Impacts Of Information Technology Upon The Retail Stores

Information Technology and Business Sector

Questions:

What Are The Impacts Of Information Technology Upon The Retail Stores?

What Are The Impacts Of Information Technology On The Quality Of Service?

How The Information Technology In Panda Retail Company Can Be Improved After Conducting The Research?

There are many authors who have expressed their interests towards the information technology and a variety of fields in the business sector is influenced by the information technology (Singh, 2014). Information technology is related to building information system in a company which includes hardware, database, software, and network as well as related other components as stated by Shelly (2006). Vasudevan (2008), further expanded that information technology is a subject that have gained in popularity among the business organizations and most important in the retail industries as it helps to deal with many functions and increase the business convenience (Joshi, 2009).

As the marketing of the retail sectors are becoming more and more driven by the customers, the information technology is gaining its ground and more importantly are attracting more customers towards the retail businesses. There are a variety of large retail companies which includes Tesco, Wal-Mart, and Sainsbury which focuses upon the technological development in order to increase their turnover and also to collect information about the customers and store that information in their database (Schwalbe, 2015).

Fast replacement is taking place in the retail sector due to implementation of Information Technology in the business and tools like calculators in the counters are being replaced at fast pace with the help of IT tools. Internet is used by the retail organization as a means to communicate with the customers of the organization, for the marketing purposes, for planning the financial wellness of the organization and also for the purpose of management.

In order to cope with the rising amount of competition in the modern world, the retail sectors are facing difficulties to cope with the business rivals in the market as stated by Martson (2007). The rising amount of competition has forced the business that is there in the retail sector to ease the problems of the business with the use of information technology (Chae et al., 2014). Also the growth of information technology in the retail sector have helped the business is saving up of costs of the business operations so that the business is able to save the money for later use or invest in a different portfolio.

Information Technology’s Effect on Quality of Service

Panda Retail Company is a grocery store which is based in Saudi Arabia and was founded before 39 years in 1978. It also ranks among the top 9 companies among 100 Saudi Arabian companies. The workforce employed by the company is huge in number which is 18, 000 Savola Group is the parent company of the Panda Retail (Savola.com, 2017).

The research question that will be formed in the later part of the study will help to conduct the study about specific objectives that will be selected and finding out the answers to those questions will help the company make their IT operations better in nature and more improved.

Now this topic is significant of a management level inquiry as the main objective of management is to improve the efficiency of the organization and with the help of improved information technology, an organization can improve their efficiency as well as productivity.

Though there are many research that have been conducted in this particular field of information technology influence upon the business organizations, there are researches which are very few in number which are related to the impact of information technology in the retail sector, which have been identified as the research gap and for that reason, this particular topic have been selected for study to get an in-depth understanding regarding the topic.

The problem that has been identified is a present issue as information technology is a very recent subject and the impact of information technology in all the field of a retail organization cannot be ignored (Pantano, 2014). The research question that have been formed in the later part of the research are worth studying due to the fact that it can help to bring out the development among the retail sectors of the country and the researcher can also gain idea and being a management student, the researcher can also gain insight about the impact of information technology in retail organizations

The research questions are formed from the research objectives and answering those questions can help the researcher to answer the problems that have been identified by the researcher. The research questions that have been formed are mentioned below

The objective of the research can also be termed to as the research aims which focuses upon having an understanding the impact of information technology on the retail sectors. Some objectives of the research are mentioned below:

• To understand the Information technology impact upon the retail stores.
• To determine the impact of Information Technology on Quality of Service.
• To provide a recommendation in order to improve the IT technology of Panda retail Company.

The hypothesis testing of the research can be done with the help of two hypotheses that can be taken in order to conduct the research as mentioned below:

Improving Information Technology in Panda Retail Company

H0: Investing in Information Technology has no impact in performance of the organization.

H1: Investing in Information technology has a huge positive impact in performance of the organization.

There is a whole lot of significance of this particular research and with the completion of this research successfully, the managers of the retail organization can gain a lot of knowledge regarding how they can save the labours by implementation of information technology in their organization. Additionally, it will also help to understand that how retail organization can make changes in the price and manage inventory in a better manner. The managers can also gain better competitive advantage over the competitors of the same industry by understanding better implementation of IT in their organizations (Holtshouse, 2013). The customers those who are loyal to the company products can also be understood with the help of maintaining a CRM database and also new ways can be discovered with the help of which business crisis can be avoided. Lastly, information technology can also help the retail organizations to devise new strategies which can help the managers of the organization make the corrcet6 and appropriate decisions.

The significance of information technology in retail business organization is immense and data is the most powerful tool which enables the retail organizations to make decisions as stated by Zott (2010) (Zott et al., 2015). He further explained that right data at the right place which is available at the right time can help the retailers make decisions that are very effective in nature. According to Chesbrough (2010), the role of information technology can have a positive effect upon the retail organizations which can help the business organization maximize their revenue. Information technology is a present subject which has been introduced very recently before which the retail businesses used the traditional methods. During the traditional retailing, there was no use of technology in the organization but still the organizations were successful (Baden-Fuller et al., 2013). As stated by Debruyne (2010), the guarantee of the success in the past is not the guarantee of success during the future period of time as the business organization if uses traditional methods of doing business during nowadays, it have chances of failing miserably.

As there are shifts in the marketing which came on the latter half of the 20^th century with the introduction of technology in the market, there was a noticeable shift which was seen among the expectations of the customers (Veit et al., 2014). According to Padgett (2007), many researchers from the past believed that the online businesses are able to take help of the internet 24*7 in order to sale their products while only offline businesses had to remain close after a certain time of the day. It has been stated in Padgett’s research that there were many researchers who also believed that the online businesses can replace the traditional forms of businesses totally which is wrong assumption made on the part of the researchers as it has been found at the later part that primary reason for usage of internet by the businesses is to collect the data about the customers and also to supply the information to the customers but not to shift towards the online business (Laudon et al., 2013).

Implementation of Information Technology in Large Retail Companies

Nowadays it can be seen that there are many traditional retailers who are doing online business as well as their presence can be found in offline shops. This is a process which helps the retail organization stay competitive in the industry and gain more profit from the market as stated by Ricart (2009). Profit is an important factor which helps the businesses to run for a very long time and information technology helps the business organization bring in that profit in the modern days.

This particular research will be a primary one and will focus to collect data which are of quantitative in nature as well as qualitative. Both primary and secondary data will be collected in order to form the research. The primary data will be collected from the retail customers as well as from the managers of Panda Retail Company while the secondary data will be collected to form the literature part of the research. The secondary data will include data that will be collected from online libraries, books, journals, magazines and so on.

The population that will be selected for the purpose of the study will include 180 customers who were approached for the purpose of study. Also in order to gather qualitative data for the research, it is important to gather data from the managers for which the 4 managers of Panda Retail Company will be approached.

The design of the sample that will be selected for the purpose of doing this research is random sampling as the customers will be selected in random basis. Under this sampling method each and every customer has the equal opportunity to get chosen for the research purpose (Goldstein et al., 2015).

The data collection method is another significant method which will be done with the help of questionnaires as well as in the form of interview. Internet will be used in order to distribute the questionnaires to the customers and for the managers face to face interviews will be arranged for the data collection purpose.

Data Analysis is the most significant part of the research as a small mistake on the part of the researcher can result in wrong outcome of the research (Miles et al., 2013). For the purpose of analysing the data, the researcher will use tools like SPSS, graphs, charts and excel so that he is able to arrive a conclusion after the result outcome form analysis.

References:

Baden-Fuller, C. and Haefliger, S., 2013. Business models and technological innovation. Long range planning, 46(6), pp.419-426.

Chae, H.C., Koh, C.E. and Prybutok, V.R., 2014. Information technology capability and firm performance: Contradictory findings and their possible causes. Mis Quarterly, 38(1).

Goldstein, H., Lynn, P., Muniz-Terrera, G., Hardy, R., O’Muircheartaigh, C., Skinner, C. and Lehtonen, R., 2015. Population sampling in longitudinal surveys. Longitudinal and Life Course Studies, 6(4), pp.447-475.

Holtshouse, D.K., 2013. Information technology for knowledge management. Springer Science & Business Media.

Joshi, G., 2009. Information Technology for retail. Oxford University Press, Inc..

Laudon, K.C. and Traver, C.G., 2013. E-commerce. economics.

Miles, M.B., Huberman, A.M. and Saldana, J., 2013. Qualitative data analysis. Sage.

Pantano, E., 2014. Innovation drivers in retail industry. International Journal of Information Management, 34(3), pp.344-350.

Schwalbe, K., 2015. Information technology project management. Cengage Learning.

Singh, J., 2014. A Review of Impact of Information Technology in Retail Sector. International Journal of Management Research and Reviews, 4(11), p.1047.

Veit, D., Clemons, E., Benlian, A., Buxmann, P., Hess, T., Kundisch, D., Leimeister, J.M., Loos, P. and Spann, M., 2014. Business models. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 6(1), pp.45-53.

Zott, C. and Amit, R., 2015. Business model innovation: toward a process perspective. Oxford Handbook of Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship: Multilevel Linkages. Oxford University Press, New York: NY, pp.395-406.