Hc1041 | Business | A Assessment Answers

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Case study -- Blooming with Technology

The use of information technology is needed by every industry size and type of business. Small businesses can realize the positive effects through adopting technology. However, small businesses often do not have the resources and expertise of large corporations to implement information technology strategies. However, the benefits of technology for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are just as crucial to business operations and strategy.

Consider Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery, located in Colorado. This small nursery was like many other small businesses and garden centers. They used manual registers to track and maintain its inventory as well as determine which products were realizing the most profit. The profits from the nursery were either "negligible" or a loss. They did not have access to useful operational data to effectively manage their business. For example, they did not track or review the margins of individual products. However, they believed that they needed to do something different for their $1M business operation.

Enter a new point-of-sale system (POS) in 2008. The system allowed the owners to track useful business data from the sales transactions immediately at the time of the sale; eliminating the need for tracking sales manually. The system processes and stores data from the sale while updating the inventory as well as compiling a sales history. This eliminates reliance on manual entry of sales transactions and reduction of inventory units for the items sold. POS systems provide much more than a cash register. These systems provide more robust functionality in inputting, tracking, and distributing data to provide useful information to operate and manage the business.

Accurate inventory data maintained by the POS helped with decision making. Decisions on how many units of a product to order were no longer based on speculation about current inventory units. Now, accurate inventory counts eliminate the guesswork on how much to order, helping the business to operate on leaner inventory units. The system's reporting can provide the detail transactions for an inventory item, such as how many were purchased, discarded, and sold.

The implementation of a POS system also confirmed that the owners did not know as much about their business as they thought they did. As they reviewed reports from the new system, they saw that some products were less profitable than they thought. The more detailed cost reporting by item helped them to understand which products contributed the most profit to the operation. Their new perspective of the "real costs" provided the opportunity to shift production to the higher-profit items, thereby gaining more profit. Prior to implementing the POS system, they simply did not have the time to approach this level of decision making.

Knowledge of their detailed product costs helps them to price products more profitably. Price changes can be implemented temporarily (for a promotion) or permanently and still remain within acceptable product margins. The accurate and timely reporting of this information assists them to be more effective managers of their business operations.

The ability of the system to process sales, inventory, and purchasing transactions immediately reduces the need for data entry of paper information. The time savings can be used for managing the business rather than mundane clerical functions.

The new system has expanded Four Seasons' management control over employee schedules to review and allocate labour expenses to specific departments and functions. An additional benefit allows the owners to delegate more responsibility to the staff and establish accountability. Instead of the owners establishing goals, they provide the

system's data and ask staff to submit their sales goals for the next reporting period. Ultimately, the information technology system creates a solid infrastructure to process and report the businesses operations for the entire enterprise.

The garden centre is an excellent example of how technology can realize benefits for a business. The ability for organizations to remain competitive and agile is crucial. These systems allow organizations large and small to leverage business data to gain a competitive advantage and operational efficiency.

Introduction

In this report the emphasis will be given on the case related to Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery.  Information technology is one of the techniques that help the business to achieve growth by offering new technology to the companies so that their overall business activities can be simplified. It can be easy for the companies to consider innovative techniques with the help of information technology. By considering the innovation it has been seen that it results to collecting of the information, faster execution processes and also proper distribution of the data in the company.

In this paper the emphasis is given on the innovation related to information technology in the business which is related with POS system. The system of POS is considered as the combination related to hardware and software and it is considered for taking the payments from the customers so that business transactions can be done effectively.

It has been analyzed that discussion will be made on the advantages and disadvantages of POS system, benefits of the centralized database and also how the POS systems is considered for making the right decisions. Also, there are telecommunication options that will be recommended for POS system and also risks concerned to POS system will be analyzed.

Advantages and disadvantages of new POS System

It can be evaluated that POS system can offer any company like Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery with many advantages and also with the disadvantages. In context to Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery the discussion will be made on the advantages and disadvantages.

It can been analyzed that the process of accounting process of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery will be improved by considering the new POS system. In the case it has been stated by the accountant that company has to manage the many receipts which are one of the time consuming process. The new system of POS will assist Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery to focus on the reporting system that will help to manage the different department of the company.

The new POS system will help the company to enhance the overall control of the management in relation with the employees schedule and also it will help to analyze the salaries of various departments.  With the help of new POS the company can easy consider the better accountability function and will offer the owner to have proper access of control on the employees. They can now easily ask the personnel to offer the next objective of the sales for the coming years as data analytics can be done with the help of the new POS system (Eason, 2014). By taking into consideration new POS system it can be simple for Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery to have infrastructure which is good so that activities of the company can be managed effectively.

There are also various disadvantages related to POS system. It has been seen that Cyber Attacks can take place if there is no proper inventories set up in the overall list of inventory. The centralized system can also help the company to maintain the private data of the customers and employees which will help them to grow in the competitive market (Polasik et al., 2013).

POS System for attaining competitive advantage

It has been seen that POS of sale can be considered for many reasons in context to Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery. The company can attain the competitive advantage by considering the new technology.

POS is considered as the system which is less costly and also faster. It can be stated that the information can be tracked with the help POS as to implement the system in the company is simple and it helps the company in retaining the overall process of the business at the time of installation phase. The system can also offer the overall competitive advantage by allowing saving the human efforts for the long time. The customers can easily maintain the overall transaction of the company just because of the peripheral bar code scanner which is in the system. It can also assist the company in managing the overall track of the inventories and will also help to access the inventory which is left. Just because of this the paper work will be reduced and also it can be simple for the company to achieve the competitive advantage (Profeta, Balling and Roosen, 2013).

Advantages of centralized database

In the Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery, it has been analyzed the centralized database will assist the company in maintaining the overall security of the information as there are many people who can access the information of the people. To collect the data from the single database can be considered as secure if comparison is made with the collection of the data from many databases. The information from the centralized database will assist the company in managing and storing the overall data. Also with the help of centralized database it can be simple for the company manages the information preservation. With the help of the database it can be simple to enhance the reliability of the data and advanced features can also be considered by the company (Rese, Schreiber and Baier, 2014).

POS system and decision making

In Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery it has been seen that POS system can help the company in making the reports so that decision of the business can be made in the correct manner. If POS is installed effectively in the workplace then it can manage the entire activities of the business. It has been seen that through this it can be easy to consider the answer of maintaining the overall efficiency of the employees in the workplace. With the help of this it can be easy to offer continuous feedback to the employees. The new system will offer the company to maintain their overall capability related to decision making and will increase the inventory system management (Ingram et al., 2015).

Telecommunication options

There are various recommendations in relation to Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery. It is necessary to consider various types of network like LAN. It is considered as the network of computers that can be seen on the small area.  There are considered for having proper connection with personal computers and work stations. With the help of this it can be easy to send emails and chats. By focusing on this case it can be stated that for connecting the LAN with the terminal of POS, 4 twisted pair shielded cable can be considered.

WAN is also considered as the wide area network that can help to link with bunch of LANs. It can be seen that difference can be related to the geographical area which is covered. MAN is also considered as the metropolitan area network that helps to consider the difference related to the entire campus. It has been seen that MAN network are smaller as compared to WAN but it is larger than LAN (Boddy, McCalman and Buchanan, 2018).

It can be stated that wired communication medium can be considered in wired networks whereas it has been seen that wireless network can consider the remote communication system which will help to facilitate the data between the different areas.

Risks

There are various risks which are linked with the POS System. The risks are related to security, privacy and confidentiality.

Security risks are considered as the risk in which hackers can consider the method to breach the security of the POS device. By considering this case it can be seen that hackers consider vulnerabilities of the POS system. In many recent cases, the system of POS can also lack in the hardware system of encryption. If these situations arise then it can be simple for the hackers to use the internal data. Also the phishing attack can be considered by the Spam mails which consist of the fake login page in which the victim can login into the terminal of POS by considering the fake webpages (Gomzin, 2014).

Privacy risk is also the risk in which it has been seen that digital ID of the employees and customers can be considered by the POS terminals. Also through this it can be analyzed that wrong information can be gathered by the terminal of POS which can enhance the issue for the customers.

Confidentiality risk: in this the important data is always the target of the hackers. The important data can be hacked and the information can be easily transmitted to the other devices like payment information and also the information related to transactions (Cannataci et al., 2016).

Recommendations

Also it can be recommended that company should take into consideration proper implementation of the POS system so that it can be easy to make the decisions and also it will help the company to grow in the competitive market.

Conclusion

By taking into consideration all the aspects it can be concluded that by focusing on the new POS system can help the company to make the right decisions. Also it will help to manage the overall inventory of the company that will directly impact on the customer satisfaction. For making the right decision, the company should consider the system of POS. Also the POS system will help to manually track the data.

References

Boddy, D., McCalman, J. and Buchanan, D.A., 2018. The New Management Challenge: Information Systems for Improved Performance. Routledge.

Cannataci, J.A., Zhao, B., Torres Vives, G., Monteleone, S., Bonnici, J.M. and Moyakine, E., 2016. Privacy, free expression and transparency: redefining their new boundaries in the digital age. UNESCO Publishing.

Eason, K.D., 2014. Information technology and organisational change. CRC Press.

Farias, A.S.P., 2015. System for accessing a POS terminal, method for downloading and updating applications and method for performing electronic operation using such a system. U.S. Patent 9,131,012.

Gomzin, S. 2014. Hacking Point of Sale: Payment Application Secrets, Threats, and Solutions. John Wiley and Sons.

Ingram, T.N., LaForge, R.W., Williams, M.R. and Schwepker Jr, C.H., 2015. Sales management: Analysis and decision making. Routledge.

Polasik, M., Górka, J., Wilczewski, G., Kunkowski, J., Przenajkowska, K., and Tetkowska, N. 2013, June. Time efficiency of Point-of-Sale payment methods: Empirical results for cash, cards and mobile payments. In International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (pp. 306-320). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Profeta, A., Balling, R., and Roosen, J. 2013. The relevance of origin information at the point of sale. Food Quality and Preference, 26(1), 1-11.

Rese, A., Schreiber, S., and Baier, D. 2014. Technology acceptance modeling of augmented reality at the point of sale: Can surveys be replaced by an analysis of online reviews?. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 21(5), 869-876.