Randall K. (Randy) Fields is CEO and President of Park City Group, Inc. a software development and consulting services company based in Park City , Utah . Fields is responsible for the strategic direction of Park City Group's two application suites: Fresh Market Manager, software suite that addresses the needs of organizations with perishable inventory, production planning and product forecasting and category and costing requirements and ActionManagerT a suite of 20 integrated software applications for business operations management for geographically distributed multi-unit businesses.
In the early 1970's, Fields established a financial and economic consulting firm called Fields Investment Group. He co-founded Mrs. Fields Cookies with Debbi Fields, and served as its chairman from 1978 to 1990. During his tenure at Mrs. Fields Cookies, Fields pioneered the development of Fresh Market Manager and ActionManager software systems to provide innovative management solutions for Mrs. Fields Cookies. Based on the acclaim surrounding Fields; use of technology in operating business environments, and the effectiveness of the software in producing benefits and results, he founded Park City Group in 1990.
Randy and Debbi co-founded the Mrs. Fields Children's Health Foundation and served as Directors for several charitable institutions, including the Primary Children's Hospital and the LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City . He is a contributing editor to Chief Executive Magazine, and has written extensively on the subject of using technology to solve business challenges. Articles regarding Fields' concepts, companies and products have been featured in business publications such as Forbes, Business Week, INC Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Management Review as well as computer and trade magazines including Computerworld, Information Week, PC Week, Network World, Datamation, RIS News and Chain Store Age Executive.
Fields holds both bachelor and masters degrees from Stanford University , where he was a Phi Beta Kappa, Danforth Fellow and National Science Foundation Fellow.
Historical Business Biography
When Mr. and Mrs. Fields married, Mr. Fields agreed with everyone that Debbi Fields made the best cookies ever. Mrs. Fields' special chocolate chip cookies became famous with Mr. Fields' business associates, who urged her to open a store and sell her specialty cookies. Consequently, on August 13, 1977 , the first store opened in Palo Alto , California , near Stanford University . From that first store, Mrs. Fields Cookies has grown into an international institution with a reputation for exquisite taste and superior quality.
As the number of Mrs. Fields Cookies stores increased, Mrs. Fields concluded that the hour-to-hour management skills she used in her first store made the company successful, and must be implemented in each of the stores. The Company needed to meet this goal but still retain a flat company management structure. However, designing a flat-line management structure was thought to be very difficult; the objective would be to maintain the same high level of success realized in the first store in both product and management efficiency.
By 1984, Mr. Fields and Mr. Paul Quinn, Mrs. Fields Cookies' Vice President of Management Information Systems, had created a solution: Retail Operations Intelligence (ROI), an innovative computer software system. Simply stated, the system allowed store managers, district managers, and regional directors across the country to have daily contact with Mrs. Fields and the company's top administrative staff, via computer.
Additionally, the very first versions of today's Fresh Market Manager applications were developed for the Mrs. Fields Cookies operation. Designing, implementing and having patents granted on the innovative aspects of the technology, this software that helped to make Mrs. Fields a successful company has been enhanced with state of the art technology and is available to the retail market.
Faced with the daunting task of accurately forecasting product demand in a low margin business with a short shelf-life product (2 Hours), Fields and his team built a solution that has incredible applicability to today's perishable departments of grocery and supermarkets. These supermarkets are faced with the intense pressures of Wal-Mart and other super centers for their very existence and Fresh Market Manager and ActionManager together provide the only end-to-end solution in the market today.
The systems address operations management tasks, such as:
• Item level category management
• Scheduling crews
• Interviewing applicants
• Generating supply orders
• Producing sales reports and projections
• Managing inventory and production planning
• Administering skill tests
• Transmitting memo
• Assessing employee knowledge
Using ROI automation, district and regional managers reduced administrative paperwork by 60% to 70%. Consequently, the store managers were freed from the back office to concentrate on driving sales and developing skills within their sales teams.
The success of ROI software at Mrs. Fields Cookies generated widespread interest in the product from the business community. In May 1990, Riverview Software Group was spun off as a separate, privately held company from Mrs. Fields Inc. and became known as the Park City Group. Today, the applications are known as the Fresh Market Manager and ActionManager application products.
