1. Management Decision Making Problem: Canadian tire is one of Canada’s largest companies, with 57,000 employees and 1,200 stores & gas stations across Canada selling sports, leisure, home products, apparel; and financial services as well as automotive & petroleum products. The retail outlets are independently owned & operated.

Canadian Tire was using daily mailings & thick product catalogs to inform its dealers about new products, merchandise setups, best practices, product ordering, and problem resolution and is looking for a BETTER WAY to provide employees with human resources & administrative documents.

To Answer: What are the problems created by this way of doing business and how can knowledge management systems help?

Cite specific examples from Ch 11 and from your outside research. Describe various ways that knowledge management systems could help here & what kind & why. Try to include a product name/vendor that offers an appropriate solution for this function.

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2. Using Intelligent Agents for Comparison Shopping: A systems agent is a computer program that acts for a user (goal-directed behavior), such as a shopping bot, monitoring/surveillance (predictive) agent, or data-mining agent.

Shopping bots are knowledge information systems that have their own product information databases. They travel around a network retrieving info about goods/services and work very efficiently for commodity products like CDs, books, electronic components, etc.

For this question you will use shopping bots to search online for products & find product info/best prices/vendor.

Select a digital camera (such as the CanonPowerShot S100 or the Olympus Tough TV-820). Visit MySimon (http://www.mysimon.com), BizRate.com (http://www.bizrate.com), and Google Product Search (http://www.google.com/shopping) to do price comparisons for you. You can also include another shopbot that you’ve had success with.

Evaluate each of these 3 shopping sites in terms of their ease & use, number of offerings, speed in obtaining info, thoroughness of info offered about the product & seller, and price selection. Which of these sites would you use & why? Did you find another/better shopping bot site?

Which camera would you select & why based on what you found? How helpful were these sites for making your decision?