MAN211 Human Resource Management- Information Handling

You will complete a portfolio of documents as evidence of your learning by submitting them to your teacher each week, so you can gain progressive feedback on your work. These exercises are designed to help you develop your existing business document management skills – consolidation tasks in the first half of your textbook can be referred to for design complex text document review.

These tasks include:

Using your current employment company, establish procedures for automating the information entry, storage, output, and quality of document design and production    
Evaluate the company’s present and future information technology capability in terms of its impact on document design and production  
Identify types of documents used and required by organisation   (e.g. PDF, PPT, XLS etc)
Establish documentation standards and design tasks for organisational documents in accordance with information, budget and technology requirements
Ensure standard formats and templates suit the purpose, audience and information requirements of each document  
Ensure document templates enhance readability and appearance, and meet organisational requirements for style and layout    
Test templates, obtain organisational and user feedback, and make amendments as necessary to ensure maximum efficiency and quality of presentation
Evaluate complex technical functions of software for their usefulness in automating aspects of standard document production
Match requirements of each document with software functions to allow efficient production of documents  
Test macros to ensure they meet the requirements of each document in accordance with documentation standards

Answer

Introduction

To ensure the optimality in the functions and operations of a company, it is necessary to organise all of its required information and other documents that facilitate in the functions of the said organisation (Siano 2014). Without proper maintenance and organisational skills, no company or organisation can hope to achieve efficiency and, as a result, would fall short of reaching its desired goals. The traditional methods of gathering data and maintaining documents have been used in every form of organisation for as long as organisations have been in existence (Ihme et al.2014). However, with the rise of modern technologies and new ways of executing tasks, the need to arrange and documenting the information has also evolved and expanded. The information pool has grown exponentially, especially since digital information has become an integral part of our lives and the global financial transactions. The methods and techniques to document this information have also evolved and new ways have been devised, which are discussed in the current report.

Current methods employed

The company that is under observation on the current report is a medium size retail company that sells electronic commodities and also provides services post-sales. The company is named Graham’s Electricals and Co. and is situated in Victoria. The company sales household electronic products and gives the customers a two-month free servicing period, where any issues regarding the sold products are resolved by the company without any cost to the customers.

The company has a lot of electronic appliances coming in bulks from suppliers. This makes it a necessity to keep records of everything so that every item that is brought is tracked. Currently the shop has a semi-automated system, where both software and human labour is employed. The items that come in are stored in a warehouse, that is two blocks away from the shop. The employees use digital barcode scanners on the items when they arrive and an integrated software system stores these records. Every detail about the poducts can be retrieved from the barcodes (Bask, Merisalo-Rantanen and Tuunanen 2014).

The details of the products are stored on a software in the warehouse itself. Some important overviews regarding date of purchase of a particular shipment or details about the supplier are kept in hardcopy format. Documents are stored in Excel sheets as well as in Word document files. These give a comprehensive idea about the shop’s current stock at any point of time. However, the warehouse does not have any closed circuit cameras.

On the sales counter, when an item is sold, the barcodes are again scanned and another integrated system in the shop keeps the records in excel sheets. The records of the shop are cross-checked with the documents of the warehouse to get details regarding the products that came in and which were sold. Monthly sales are stored on printed excel copies to make it easier to understand about the sales rate of the shop and evaluate it against previous month’s and also to predict about future trends.

Recommendations 

The shop has two software systems in both the warehouse as well as the shop where records about the products that are brought in and sold are kept. However, it is a cumbersome and lengthy process to cross reference the two records as the quantities are not very small in size. The shop needs to have a software upgradation that would be linked to both of these systems and automatically cross check the items when they are sold. This will save valuable time and most certainly will be more reliable as manual mistakes are easy to occur (Vlachos 2014).

 A more sophisticated software needs to be installed in the system of the shop so that the two existing software can be merged together to get a proper idea about the purchase and sales of the company. A closed circuit camera system needs to be installed as soon as possible to prevent any chances of theft or similar events.

The documents of the shop which will be compiled on the new software will have all records at a single place, making it easier to get an idea about everything. Records should be saved in PDF and XLS format making it easy to read and gain insights about the sales condition of the shop. PowerPoints can be extremely helpful in this regard, because this gives a gist of the most important aspects and notable points.

The staff who work at the shop have expressed their grief from time to time over issues they have faced like slow mobility of the whole system and the problems regarding readability of the document. The suggestions of the staff can prove to helpful i9n making critical upgrading decisions for the shop regarding the layout and format of the documents, making them more readable to easier to comprehend.

The current system is reliable and is dependable, but it is not optimal or efficient in nature. The upgrade assures the shop to be more efficient in its operations and functions are to become smoother. To enhance the software of the shop, Graham’s have also done an estimation about the expenses that are to be incurred and it seems like a $10,000 budget shall suffice in overhauling the system of the shop.

Conclusion

It is essential to reform the current operations and management of the shop. The recommended changes would be ideal for the shop to cut down on extra costs as well as increase the profit levels. Making the entire procedure automated would be enabling Graham’s to put its manpower and focus on other issues and expansion plans can also be taken care of. The software upgrade shall help the shop to be more efficient and it set to be more efficient that would enable the shop to grow and expand.

References

Bask, A., Merisalo-Rantanen, H. and Tuunanen, T., 2014. Developing a modular service architecture for E-store supply chains: The small-and medium-sized enterprise perspective. Service science, 6(4), pp.251-273.

Ihme, T., Pikkarainen, M., Teppola, S., Kääriäinen, J. and Biot, O., 2014. Challenges and industry practices for managing software variability in small and medium sized enterprises. Empirical Software Engineering, 19(4), pp.1144-1168.

Siano, P., 2014. Demand response and smart grids—A survey. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 30, pp.461-478.

Vlachos, I.P., 2014. A hierarchical model of the impact of RFID practices on retail supply chain performance. Expert Systems with Applications, 41(1), pp.5-15.