Problem Analysis The symptoms Superfood, a large supermarket chain in Europe, has recently acquired Foodonline, a company that delivers groceries to online shoppers. With this acquisition, Superfood wanted to expand their business to the online market, while also keeping all of Foodonline’s customers. Unfortunately, a lot of Foodonline’s customers ended their membership and Superfood’s own costumers almost never order online, despite having promoted this new online delivery system. Also, employee-related incidents, like arguments with customers and theft in Superfood supermarkets, have increased, while in the newly acquired online delivery branch of the company error rates have also increased in the assembly and delivery sections. Employees also express more …show more content…
From these warehouses, trucks transported the orders to the costumer’s homes. After the acquisition, to reduce costs, the number of warehouses were brought down to a maximum of three per country. This has resulted in an increased delivery time from 12 to 36 hours. This increase in delivery time could also potentially cause costumers to give up their Foodonline memberships. Through our investigation we’ve also found out that Foodonline’s customer base was approximately 8% of Superfood’s customer base. This tells us that Foodonline and Superfood had a very different customer base. The customer base of Superfood consists of 3% below 16 years of age, 23% are between 17 and 25, 13% are between 25 and 45, 23% are between 45 and 65, and 38% are above 66 years of age. Finally, we’ve found that the acquisition was introduced as a way to bring Superfood into the 21st century. The employees of Superfood responded with mixed feelings as the majority of Superfood employees has worked there for a long time, know most of the regular customers and generally like the old ways of doing things in the