Initiate and lead Applied Research Case Study Assessment

Case Study WORLDUCATION

Worlducation is a social startup that manufactures tablet computers for primary school students. They not only focus on the hardware, but they also have a competitive team creating software, content, and activities to better engage and educate the students.

Worlducation aims to change the way children learn at school by implementing artificial intelligence technology that can follow up on each child's progress and adjust to their needs as they learn, creating the optimal path learning experience.

So far, Worlducation only sells their tablet computers business to business (B2B) as they realized that their content and hardware proved most effective when a whole classroom was using it, and a teacher was coordinating the activities. Also, this helped the sales team focus on larger scales and minimized the potential number of problems that could arise from individual customers. However, the long-term plan is to also tackle a business-to-consumer strategy (B2C).

What makes Worlducation completely different from its competition is that they envision a world in which every child learns how to read and write a world without illiteracy. Given this vision, for every classroom that buys their products, they donate and train a classroom somewhere around the world that can't afford the same technology. Furthermore, they connect the two classrooms (those who bought the products and services and those who received the donation) so that they can grow together and collaborate throughout their learning cycle. Worlducation was founded in 2016, and by the end of 2019 they had sold over 35,000 tablets to over 550 schools in 23 countries, generating revenue in hardware sales and software subscriptions.

Worlducation headquarters are in Sydney's CBD but they have a development team in Bulgaria, a manufacturing team in Hong Kong, and operation and sales/marketing staff in Colombia, Egypt, Iceland, Russia, and the Philippines.

Worlducation has a complex supply chain that begins when a sale is made usually via a sales representative or through an online inquiry that is handled by the sales team. Sales are recorded in an internal Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERP System) which notifies the operations team that an order needs to be delivered. The operations team verifies the sales order and authorizes the delivery of a manufacturing request to the factory in Hong Kong. The manufacturing team in Hong Kong notes the order specifications and delivery details and incorporates this within its production schedule. The order is manufactured and the operations team arranges freight and shipping directly to the customer.

Its management structure is shown below:

Worlducation's organizational structure is shown in the figure below.

Information specific to the start of this assessment:

Worlducation started in 2020 with a huge sale to a school in Portugal. Although it was a great start, the context for the rest of the quarter was highly uncertain due to COVID-19. Surprisingly the pandemic brought hundreds of new leads and that led to the unprecedented growth that brought alongside dozens of operation and production problems.

The factory in Hong Kong closed down for 1 month due to government restrictions limiting supply, the sales team was overwhelmed with sales meetings over ZOOM, the tech-support team had to re-adapt the software to remote learning for many of the schools, and the founders had to start thinking on how education was going to change after this worldwide event. Sales representatives felt confused about how their job roles had evolved and were unsure of what was expected of them.

Many sales representatives felt uneasy about maintaining client relationships and support without face-to-face in-person interaction and client feedback showed a mismatch between their requirements and those offered by the software adaptations. Further investigation by the sales manager revealed that sales representatives needed development in asking the correct questions to fully understand the quickly evolving needs of individual clients.

Since COVID-19 and the closure of the factory due to government restrictions, of the 2000 tablets due to be shipped by April, only 500 were completed on schedule. This resulted in numerous customer complaints. Sales representatives felt ill-equipped to handle the complaints and deal with emotional clients.

The CEO has asked the sales manager to create a performance development program plan to address the new challenges faced by sales representatives (they are to achieve individual goals within 8 weeks) and to decrease the number of client complaints by 80%. The program must address the gaps in the skills and knowledge of the sales representatives but not incur any additional costs. The CEO also requested an update on the progress of the performance development and client satisfaction via email every two weeks due to the evolving challenges of COVID-19.

The sales manager surveyed the sales representatives to establish their learning preferences. Of the ten sales representatives, 6 preferred to learn through mentoring and coaching, 3 preferred to ask questions, read and research information by themselves and 1 preferred role-playing situations to practice skills. The survey also revealed that the majority of staff members would appreciate a day off work if the number of client complaints decreased significantly and a few would be motivated by recognition (e.g. employee of the week).

As soon as the performance development program was implemented, the sales manager started collecting data against the CEO's criteria (reduced complaints and improved skills).

Data from feedback registers reflect customer complaints as follows:

Data reflecting unattained sales representatives personal performance development goals (taken from their personal performance development plans) includes:

When Sales representative #4 was questioned about his performance (no personal goals achieved), he complained that he was still unsure of what his role involved. All other sales representatives appreciated the training, especially the mentoring program.

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