Discuss about the Journal of Business and Economic Policy.
ALDI has a decentralized organizational structure that is lean and flat where only few staff are involve. The employees would be hardly around 150 staff. Moreover, there is no central of functions and planning department like Human Resources, Marketing, Information Systems, Controlling, or Public Relations. The central department and functions are costly and if the company follow the strategy of cost leadership, all this aspect is very much important for the firm. Aldi follow a model call Harzburger model that has outline three issues in the structure of the organization (Župi? and Giudici, 2016). In this model the manager handles the tasks as they are the in charge of implementation and responsible for whatever they implement and the result that will outcome. In the Harzburger Model the result of the job description of all the manager are defined clearly by specifying their responsibility, authority and goal for their position. With the hierarchy that Aldi follow, it could be determining that Aldi currently follows a Geographical Divisional and Functional Structure that has a decentralized delegate system. Only limited staff are there, a functional line managers who have been employed in shops and warehouses. The Area Managers take care of the operation of the store and trading rights, logistics, administration and property management. The main function is the operation and the process engineering and it emphasized the cutting cost rather than the R&D product.
Aldi is a growing supermarket, however, Autonomy is lacking due to the functional structure that is shown in figure 1. Whenever the lower division has to make decision, they have to completely depend on the final decision made by the top level of the hierarchy which create more delay (Segetlija, Mesari? and Dujak, 2014). Due to this, there has arises a negative effect on different organizational functions for coordination and communication. Now it has become difficult to pin-point the problem in the responsibility. The CEO has to work hard in verifying the individual business functions instead of focusing on single function in taking decisions and actions to promote the entire firm.
The proposed method of acquisition for this organization would be the Enterprise System. With the implementation of Enterprise System in the ALDI certain benefits will be experience by the company. There are multiple components of Enterprise System that will be discuses in this section below:
Material Requirement Planning (MRP): MRP is a software-based solution that determine the customer order and materials for production and later initiate the purchase and runs and schedule the delivery dates of the product. The purchase and delivery of the raw material are schedule, production are plan, and inventory levels are completely managed. Manufacturer make sure about the customer demand and expectations regarding the product and deliver it on time without going overboard.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): The company can use CRM to efficiently manage the prospect and customer information (Grall, 2016). The user can document the basic information of the customer and keep the track of the information for an enterprise value insight to significantly enhance the relationship. With this system a manual documentation has been replaced such as the Excel spreadsheet and handwritten notes.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP): ERP handles the internal and external resources that are integrated through a computer-based system. It includes the materials, stocks, human resources and financial resources in the ALDI organization (Werner and Lim, 2017). The activities are undertaken internally from developing the system and maintaining and implementing the system. The operation of the business merge with the enterprise-wide system environment.
Distribution Requirements Planning (DRP): The DRP process makes efficient delivery of goods based on quantities. It helps in minimizing the shortages and cost is reducing for the order, transport and goods that are hold.
E-Commerce: Enterprise System Technology has E-commerce as the most powerful tool that can transform the methodologies of the business and impact the communication with the customer. The revolution of E-commerce in ALDI is for business-to-business (B2B) commercial (Brown and Dant, 2014).
The figure describes the sales process in the ALDI organization. The flowchart has divided into three components namely, Account Management, Sales and Customer. In the customer section the Customer contacts the Company and agrees to take a sales meeting (Mazzarol and Clark, 2016). In the process the customer involves the stockholders and the decision makers and evaluates the solution and comes to the final decision. In the Sales section, the sales person gets connected with the customer and discover or may need assessment from the customer (Simon, Fischbach and Schoder, 2014). With the involvement of the decision makers and the stakeholders and after discovering a solution has been presented. Customer then decide whether to buy or not. If the customer does not want to buy it nurture in the marketing drip campaign or else if the customer decides to buy it fulfil the order and coordinate with the system implementation. In the final part, the account management team accept the implementation and enhance and maintain the relationship with the customer. It then gathers the data and check into customer review. If the review is negative, it conducts the defector studied and nurture in to the Drip constrain. And if the review is positive then it continues to enhance and maintain the relationship with the customer.
In this system, the problem arises mostly while checking through the order that customer want to place. Due to slow internet connection, usually customer could not load the page that contains the product they want to purchase (Antonio, 2014). The second problem arise with when multiple product is selected and customer cannot identify which item is merchant fulfil and which is the ALDI products (Amirul et al., 2017). The third problem comes during the making of the payment. Customer selected certain item to get the benefit of the offer that has been show in some of the product but on the final order payment making process, customer usually get confuse of what offer and where the offer has been provided and even get confuse of whether they have actually got the offer at the final payment process (Arcega et al., 2015). Sometimes the payment gets fail due to bad connection of the internet but customer see that they have receive a message that the payment has been deducted from their account.
MYOB works with Microsoft programs. Aldi can use MYOB as an accounting software for business purposes. The cloud software is attractive and is a user-friendly application. The development of the application shows that It has a dashboard that provides data in plain English like the term ‘Money in and ‘Money out’ (Tran-Nam, 2015). Even a non-accountant can understand such sorts of descriptions. It has the feature of creating an invoice, making bills payment on the top menu option. It has on similar features like Saasu. The Dashboard has a shortcut buttons instead of taking a two click option in the menu button. This has made the application a touchscreen friendly. Those users who have chosen for the plan of Essential has the feature to store scanned document. The application contains plenty of reports like the essential GST report that completes the BAS, Balance Sheet and Trail balance (Ramli et al., 2015).
MYOB has provided products to small and big businesses that are physical installation based, cloud based, or browser based software (Fakieh, B., Blount and Busch, 2016). MYOB is used as a tool by the accountant to assist the client. It has multiple partnerships that maximises the usability of this software. MYOB has the largest plans available in the market presently for the business (Aduamoah et al., 2017). The plans have generally three categories- AccountRight, Essentials and AccountEdge. Essential plans start from $40 a month and AccountRight tiers plan start from $92 a month. AccountEdge is for Mac users which is a one-off software purchase. The plan for AccountEdge starts at $549 and it cost upto $3599. In 2017, MYOB has a solid performer rating with four stars (Wilson, 2014).
The above figure clearly describes about the cloud based products that are used in Australia, US and New Zealand. If the brand of MYOB is considered, all the plans are used by the company. On the other hand, Xero, Intuit, Reckon and Saasu cloud focused products are only chosen.
There are number of different plans of MYOB in comparison with other accounting software related companies. If the section above about the figure 2 clearly demonstrate the use of the plans of MOYB in comparison with the other software that are available in the market. MYOB software offers quite high-end options for competitors as its plan are well quipped for offline users. MYOB even fits better when there is no Wi-Fi access. In comparison with the competitors Aldi provide the lowest cost. It has the ability to offer something diifernt to the bueyers from that of the competitors. It has lower the cost in serving the niche (De Haas, Herold and Schaefer, 2017).
From the figure above it is clearly understood that the brand name and efficiency are rare, hard to imitate and provide a best advantage that the organization can get in comparison with other competitors.
Accounting software is not an easy implementation. Moreover, it is a cloud based accounting software which is not based on conventional system (Sallem et al., 2017). It does not have its own design. The employees have previously adapted the traditional accounting methods. Thus, it will be difficult for them to face the new software and to use them. The employees may need training to use the accounting software. At the initial stage, it may take more time in processing the invoice and expenses with the use of this software. However, the speed goes up higher with time progress with continues use of the software.
Aldi must use the MYOB system typically to control the maximum use of paper work. Since it is completely a paperless work though is a bit complex, costly, time consuming but once the employee starts working on this accounting software then Aldi would have a full benefit of it. The reason for this recommendation is because Aldi is a successful business in the current competitive market and they will still remain independent and work as an independent market. The risk also reduces and moreover Aldi is financially a stable company. Therefore, spending an extra cash is wiser then taking a risk of possible damage.
References
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