Kudler and Its Business Chain - Essay Example

Kudler Fine Foods Table of Contents Table of Contents 2 Introduction 3 2.Kudler and its business chain 4 3.Kudler’s current technological base (Hardware and Software upgrade) 4 4.Kudler’s opportunities and how it can be maximized 5 5.Kudler’s threats in current system 6 6.Conclusion 7 References/Bibliography 9 1. Introduction The first section deals with the identification of the Kudler’s business and supply chain to better understand the business processes and information needs. The next section takes into account the present computer system of Kudler and to highlight the software and the hardware required for getting the right picture of what requires to be done. The third section taken into account the opportunities available with Kudler in terms of technology and the ways to maximize the technology. The evaluation of threats for Kudler enables us to understand the various difficulties and the proposal for developing a new system. 2. Kudler and its business chain As our loyal Kudler customers make purchases with store cards, the transactions are tracked on our system and loyalty points are awarded and accumulate over a period of time. At such time as deemed necessary by our customers, they may then redeem their loyalty points for specialty items such as gift items, specialty foods, and other products or services as made available through partnerships with external companies. Clancey (2008) mentions that Kudler’s Sales and Marketing has experienced significant growth and is now focused on expanding its services, improving the efficiency of its operations and increasing the consumer purchase cycle as a means to increasing the loyalty and profitability of its customer base. It will be shown that Service Request will be implemented in such a fashion that directly reflects Kudler Fine Foods Mission Statement of “provide our customers the finest in selected foodstuffs, wines, and related needs in an unparalleled consumer environment.” 3. Kudler’s current technological base (Hardware and Software upgrade) Kudler is presently using simple point of sale interfaces to serve its customers and must upgrade its software and hardware system. They do not possess any mechanism to track their sales, their data capturing mechanisms are not good at all. The can use Novell Replication Services to replicate the data between the three servers at each location for redundancy. The WAN connection between the stores is the weak link and thus discourages the use of one centralized server. They require maintaining a distributed database for storing its accounting data from various sites and retrieve consistent data from various sites. The existing hardware must be upgraded to Pentium computers with capacity to support large number of transactions at any point of time. Each location will be on its own subnet for security and easier administration. Smaller networks are easier to manage and troubleshoot; network traffic overall is reduced; network security can be applied more easily at the interconnections (routers) between the subnets (Forouzan, 2003). Each location will do full backups Mon-Fri of their respective servers. 4. Kudler’s opportunities and how it can be maximized The opportunities come in the form of various market success factors and technological advantages that can be exploited in the form of fetching a web interface with various internet technologies at hand. The various opportunities are in the form of: Customer confidence – A CRM system can be installed in place to better analyze customers preference, pattern of choice and other related demographic variations to their demand (Hoffer, 2002, p 231). Market strength - Kudler has good reputation in the market for its quality products and services it offers. Further, it may implement an order tracking system to ease the localization of orders any given time. It would largely help them to keep track of their goods. Trusted chain of suppliers and manufacturers network - An ERP system would take care of the various integrations and link all the various entities of the system and the business process management of Kudler. The opportunities can be maximized by using a complete business solution namely an ERP solution to optimize its resources and effectively collaborate all the suppliers, manufacturers and other business elements so that the cost of communication is reduced. The basic idea would be to synchronize the data communication and thus would result in better serving the customers and increase liability among the business entities. 5. Kudler’s threats in current system The current system does not capture the business processes in detail and does not integrate the business entities well. The various outdated hardware and software’s make sure that all the various threats to performance and response is quite certain. The internet technologies, if used pose a threat to the security of the system. However, the various security protocols must be implemented for better safety and adoption of standard policies for the organization. The security of data and its various policies would make sure that all transactional and financial data are safe. A feasible solution would be to put up a website for managing their operations and spreading their products and services over the vast internet. The website would make sure that all the business functions of the firm are represented over the internet and one gets to view the engineering principals for accessing the products for security purposes. The involvement of several internet technologies like server end programming would be quite possible for getting the ideas and services. Involvement of secure payment systems (Chaffey, 2004), after sales services, product information, comparing the products and many more can be regulated for better marketing and rendering of the customers. 6. Conclusion The current system, opportunities and threats are stressed in the paper which provides a walkthrough of Kudler’s business and the possible techniques it can strategize for better productivity of its employees and for business continuity. As a proposal, the organization can also come up with a CRM system which would assume greater responsibilities in customer nurturing and management. The CRM would also process the customer preferences, create and design strategies for marketing the goods. This would further help Kudler to overcome its threats and maximize its profits. References/Bibliography Clancey, Covington (2008). MGT571 Contemporary Management Practice, Faculty of Business. Chaffey, D. (2004). E-Business and E-Commerce Management, 2nd Edition, Prentice Hall, Pearson Education Limited, pp.46, 53, 55, 224, 492. Forouzan, A. Behrouz (2003). TCP/IP Protocol Suite, second edition. Tata McGraw Hill. Hoffer, A. Jeffrey (2002). Modern systems analysis and design. Pearson Education. Read More