Wagner Foods Inc

Q1. Give a brief overview and history of the company.

Wagner Foods Inc began as a specialty foods and manufacturing. They manufacture cereals and sell them to grocery store. Then, Wagner diversified to other customer-oriented, grain based product. Subsidiaries were bought that produced frozen breakfast foods and plastic-based packaging. The company went public in 1925 and was listed in NYSE. In late 1970 Wagner Foods decided to build new cereal manufacturing plant outside Baltimore. In total 400 acre of land has been purchased for this purposed and Wagner Development was formed.

After the construction was completed, Wagner Development further develops and holds the remaining land for sale to other companies for expansion. Following to this success, Wagner Development began to purchase and develops land further outside Baltimore including Philadelphia and Washington DC and became a well-known regional construction and development company.

In March 2000, IS department was formed and in June, 2000 application-specific software including PMAS and CMAS was purchased. The software runs on the Wagner Development’s own IBM AS 400 server.

MSD (management Science Division) formally known as MIS operates two IBM S/390 mainframe servers and IBM AS 400 server and accessible through the corporate Wide Area Network (WAN).MSD function as a profit centre within the Cereal Products Group

Q2. Identify the problem

Wagner Development wanted no part of MSD and also other division in Wagner Subsidiary reason being:

1. MSD is expensive, not responsive and take too long time to resolve issues.

2. All the other subsidiaries has their own IS Department

3. MSD doesn’t have enough computing power to handle other subsidiaries.

Managerial Problems

James Weeks, the Information Systems manager for Wagner Development which holds BS in Accounting has not determined their objective and planning, probably due to inexperience and capabilities. This is shown in his reply memo to Albert...