Case Study: Fragile Scooter Group
History
The Fragile Scooter Group has a no-nonsense design philosophy from its deep roots in the skate-park and considering scooters as a form of commuting. Nearly 20 years ago, its founders designed their first scooters out of necessity, focusing on quality. They took matters into their own hands and built scooters that would endure punishment and outperform. With this in mind, Fragile Scooter Limited was born and continues to deliver innovative high-performance scooters.
This heritage of entrepreneurial spirit and quest for design perfection is still the cornerstone of their corporate philosophy. Fragile Scooter produces scooters for the most demanding clients.
Peter Manson was at the forefront of the scooter revolution in the late 1990s realising, that the mass-produced aluminium scooters available were inadequate in many ways for the type of commuting he was doing and not something that he wanted to take to the skatepark to have some fun. So, Peter stripped down to the bare metal scooters, skateboards, and bikes lying around and rebuilt them into a single “Frankenstein” scooter that he rode to his web developer job. Once news of his Frankenstein scooter got out, Peter’s colleagues began asking him to build them a Frankenstein scooter too. From his garage—each one custom-built from cannibalised parts from other scooters, skateboards and bikes. As more and more orders came in, Peter successfully expanded Frankenstein Bikes from his garage operations into a manufacturing facility in Sydney and began producing custom scooters. These were sold through a network of specialised dealers throughout Australia.
GET HELP FROM OUR EXPERTSAt nearly the same time, halfway around the world in England, Stephen Medina was studying engineering and love taking a scooter to the skatepark on weekends. In between his studies, Peter worked at a skateboard and scooter shop in London. With his engineering studies, Stephen’s innovatively used a carbon composite material to build a frame that was significantly stronger and half the weight of other scooter frames. As a student, he did not have a great deal of money, so he partnered with a local company that manufactured his frame designs as a contract manufacturer. Soon, his frames were being used all over the United Kingdom and Europe and he started Medina Composites to market and design frames.
Peter and Stephen met each other in 2008 and immediately recognised their mutual passion for scooters. Each had been looking for a partner in different markets. They quickly realised that a merger between their two companies would be highly beneficial.
In 2001, Medina Composites and Frankenstein Scooters merged to form the Fragile Scooter Group. They share the responsibilities for managing the organisation as co-CEOs. Peter is responsible for sales, marketing, service & support, IT, finance and HR groups and Stephen is responsible for research & design, procurement, and manufacturing groups from an
organisational reporting perspective. Sitting above Peter and Stephen is a Board of Directors.
1. Create a simple organisational structure based on the divisions for Fragile Scooter Group.
Fragile Scooter Group follows a simple structure with regards to its processes:
1. Design
2. Build
3. Sell
4. Support
During these phases, they now employ agile design approaches to their product development, including design thinking.
Product Strategy
Product development is the most critical element of Fragile Scooter’s past and future growth. Fragile Scooter has invested heavily in this area, focusing on innovation, quality and safety. They look to continuously improve the performance, reliability and quality of their products. The focus historically has been on manual kick scooters.
However, the current vision is to move into e-scooters and a grand plan to diversify into the lucrative hire business with the vision to compete with Lime, Bird, Spin etc. The company understands that this would be a great undertaking and that they would need to rethink their entire organisation and enterprise architecture. As this would be a move away from a traditional manufacturing strategy to them becoming a service company as well.
Current IT Strategy
During 2010, Fragile Scooter integrated a shared services model for all IT functions, located in the London office. Along with this move to centralised IT, Global Bike also implemented SAP ERP (version 6.0), now running EhP8 release form 2016 (This is running on a Dell server that the company has named – Shelley). Prior to this, divisions were running multiple, independent application environments. All ERP functions are centralised with the primary objectives to reduce costs and deliver best-in-class technology to all divisions globally. This centralised approach offers Fragile Scooter an advanced business platform under a highly controlled environment, which enables consistency of operations and process integrity across the globe. The company is aware that Support for SAP will be continuing until 2027 but knows of the benefits that others are gaining from using SAP S/4 HANA so this is something to consider.
Most of the communications in the company rely on email and for this, they use a Microsoft Exchange server (named – Victor).
Enterprise Architecture Assignment
In part one of the assignment, the focus in on the current organisation and their enterprise architecture. You group will need to ask additional questions through Moodle to find out more about The Fragile Scooter Group and their current Enterprise Architecture – as would occur when an external consultant comes into an organisation.
This process will also involve your group coming up with several assumptions that need to be documented.
Suggested Key Headings and ideas on what to include in Part A:
a) Management Summary
b) Document Scope
i) The process of enterprise architecture
ii) The importance of enterprise architecture
c) Strategy and Business Model
i) Brief background on the organisation, focusing on the area that you are designing the new EA for (from reading the case study, you can see that there are two different options to choose from for your report).
ii) Including <<ArchiMate models – Organisation Structure View, Organisation Tree View>>
d) Overall Enterprise Architecture
i) What are the approaches that you are going to take in the development of your EA
ii) Including Architecture Principles
e) Current Architectures (Enterprise State)
i) Including ArchiMate layer models of the current state
Note: Please post questions to ‘Peter and Stephen’ through the Moodle Forum for more information about the company to help with your design of your Enterprise Architecture.
Questions need to be asked by Wednesday 3 September, to be answered with time for you to write your report.
