Modeling back office operations at greenfield online's digital consumer store

Abstract

Greenfield Online, the first online market research company, is an example of an e-business that has continued to be successful despite recent retrenchments in the Internet sector. Their core business involves developing and implementing customized market research studies. At the time of this case, they also sold "off-the-shelf" reports related to online shopping trends for specific groups of products. This case describes operations at Greenfield Online's "Digital Consumer Score" using three modeling techniques--process mapping, data flow diagramming, and entity-relationship diagramming. The simultaneous use of these techniques illustrates how they relate to each other, and demonstrates their applicability within an e-business environment. After the descriptive models set the stage, the economics of manually-performed back office processes are evaluated through a present value analysis of labor costs. The organization is left with open questions regarding how to improve the Digital Consumer Store's back office operations.