Case Study

Girl Scout Cookies

Girl Scout Cookies are American favorites. Cookie sales are a major source of funding for the Girl

Scouts, but collecting, counting, and organizing the annual avalanche of cookie orders has become

a tremendous challenge. The Girl Scouts’ traditional cookie-ordering process depends on

mountains of paperwork. During the peak sales period in January, each Girl Scout marked her

sales on an individual order card and turned the card in to the troop leader when she was finished.

The troop leader would transfer the information onto a five-part form and give this form to a

community volunteer who tabulated the orders. From there, the orders data passed to a regional

council headquarters, where they would be batched into final orders for the manufacturer, ABC

Cookies. In addition to ordering, Girl Scout volunteers and troop members had to coordinate

cookie deliveries, from the manufacturer to regional warehouses, to local drop-off sites, to each

scout, and to the customers themselves. The paperwork was overwhelming. Order transactions

changed hands too many times, creating many opportunities for error. All the added columns,

multiple prices per box, and calculations that had to be made by different people, all on a deadline.

The Patriots’ Trail Girl Scout Council, representing 65 communities and 18,000 Girl Scouts in the

greater Boston area, was one of the first councils to tackle this problem. The council sells over 1.5

million boxes of cookies each year. The council initially investigated building a computerized

system using Microsoft Access database management and application development tools. But this

alternative would have cost $25,000 to develop and would have taken at least three to four months

to get the system up and running. It was too time-consuming, complex, and expensive for the Girl

Scouts. In addition to Microsoft Access software, the Girl Scouts would have to purchase a server

to run the system plus pay for networking...