Enhancing Business With Information System: A Case Study Of Brumby’s Bakery

Discussion of Brumby’s Bakery’s structure, products and services under consideration

Brumby’s Bakery, one of the largest bread retailers is known to serve freshly baked bread; apart from that they sell various delicious food items (Laudon and Laudon 2016). Recently they have planned to take up an information system to enhance their business operations and to reach out more and more customers.

This report will showcase Brumby’s Bakery structure, the food items they sell. They have planned to take up the information system. The report will discuss the issues associated with taking up of information system. The benefits that the information system can offer will be highlighted as well. The recommendations have been detailed on how to use the information system for their business.

Discussion of the Brumby’s Bakery’s structure, products and services under consideration

Brumby’s Bakery one of the largest bread retailer stores based in Australia. They were previously known as ‘Old Style Bread Centre’. The first store, ‘Old Style Bread Centre’ was initiated in the year 1975 at Victorian suburb of Ashburton. After, that they open their subsidiary in Queensland in the 80’s and renamed the company as Brumby’s Bakery as they want to associate ‘truly Australian’ identity to the retail store. They are known to provide the freshly baked bread made from the finest ingredients and cent percent fresh wheat available in Aussie farm. They prepare various delicious food items like rolls, sandwiches, sweet and bread of course. Some of the popular delicious food items they serve are Quinoa & Linseed Low Fodmap Roll, Caramel & Pretzel Brioche Loaf, Fig & Chocolate Sourdough, ‘Tex’ – Southern Fried Chicken Baguette, Double Bacon & Egg Brioche Roll, Damper Roll-Spinach & Feta, Shell Roll, and there are lots more. All these food items are available in their stores.

Brumby’s Bakery serves homemade fresh baked goods to the customers to their stores. They are selling various kinds of food products like bread, rolls, sandwiches and sweet to the local customers. For the coming Christmas, they have prepared some delicious food items like Christmas Cake and Christmas Pudding, and they believe with the aid of information service, they can gain more profit, so they are willing to build a full-featured website for their business (Lipi, Rama and Agaraj 2015).

Any gaps and what is not working properly

The information system has the capability to embellish the business activities of the enterprise. The CRM software, accounting software can bring immense benefits to Brumby’s Bakery (Gao, Reddy and Jansen 2017). Brumby’s Bakery can maintain their financial data with the help of an e-commerce website. Moreover, the business activities can be carried out in fast and effective manner with the assistance of the information system. This can help them to earn more revenues and because of this approach their productivity will definitely get enhanced (Lipi, Rama and Agaraj 2015). Also, they can reach more and more customers via this e-commerce website. In the coming Christmas, they can earn more by selling Christmas Cake, Christmas Pudding, Raspberry & White Chocolate Balls and Christmas Fruit Mince Tarts online.

Operations and Functionality

The specific issues that the new system will fix

Brumby’s Bakery can know the products they deliver or serve with the help of the feedback received from the customers. The information system will let them stay connected with the customers all the time (Chen 2018). The customers in turn can get the scope to order foods online; can give necessary feedbacks on the foods they purchased. Brumby’s Bakery can acknowledge the latest demands of the customers. The customers can solve their own queries if incurred. Thus the Brumby’s Bakery must take up the information system and must set up an e-commerce website (Sahney 2015). The e-commerce can facilitate the customers, can increase their sales, also it gives the edge to compete with the rivals. The customers can order foods at their website anytime from anywhere, from any distant places. The physical store is capable to give little facilities, little productivity. The e-commerce service can give them popularity ss well.

Criteria that will be used to prove the proposed system meets requirements

The implementation of information technology can surely give them the edge to carry out the business activity. The marketing, the customer data, the customer support as well as the customer interaction can be embellished with the assistance of CRM software (Wang 2017). The software can be helpful to know the shopping behaviour of the customers, to acquire the purchase history of the customers. Therefore, the customer relationship diagram is basically web-based apps, and the CRM provider hosts the software. Brumby’s Bakery, the clients of the CRM service provider can have the permit to grant access to the business online via CRM provider’s safe and secure services.

Accounting software has the capability to offer multiple benefits. The benefits have been illustrated below-

1. Enhanced productivity- The accounting solutions from the accounting software applications basically accelerates the business operations. Brumby’s Bakery can keep their books updated and they do not have to take extra pressure and hassle due to the assistance of the accounting software.
2. Lessening monthly expenses- The computer application software has the capability to perform all the necessary tasks and the solutions they provide are all error-free and efficient. Brumby’s Bakery can use that software by paying revenues for an annual license and the software comes with the self-support and training services (Kallweit, Spreer and Toporowski 2014). The computer applications also save money of printing and paper. Brumby’s Bakery can save the money and can utilise it for some other useful purposes.
3. Accuracy- The human can make errors and for this reason, the financial data can be full of error. The chances of errors get reduced due to the use of accounting software, the financial data can be easily accessed and maintained with the assistance with the aid of the accounting software (Gallino and Moreno 2014). Thus Brumby’s Bakery can use the accounting software to handle their company’s financial data.
4. Simplified Tax Compliance- The accounting software comes with the report making applications, it comes with the analysis tools and the payroll assistance (Xu, Benbasat and Cenfetelli 2013). The accounting software is useful for audit preparations and acts an excellent resource for information tax.
5. Security- The software applications come with the password-protection facility, the software is not literally easy to attack and steal all the information inside thus their data can be made secure (Cao 2014).

Information Systems (IS) Strategy and details of the information system strategy that is needed as part of the overall organisational strategy

1. A user-friendly interface- The IT services can offer a user-friendly website for the e-commerce site. The workers as well the customers get benefitted due to this approach. The customers can order foods online without hectic.
2. Streaming the transaction procedures- The customers can check the stock availability and the prices with the support of POS screen and all these are possible because of information system adaption (Thakur and Srivastava 2015).
3. Lessening data collection faults- The sensitive information of Brumby’s Bakery, the customer’s data of Brumby’s Bakery can be stored easily, the accounting software and the CRM will automatically calculate and update the data contained in the database (Luo et al. 2017).
4. i Facilitates online transaction- The e-commerce activities can lead the customers of Brumby’s Bakery to purchase bakery foods anytime sitting at home, they can pay online, this removes the hassle of visiting the physical store and order foods (Pantano and Viassone 2014).

The difficulties Brumby’s Bakery may experience in developing an Information Systems Strategy

1. Brumby’s Bakery will have to spend heavily to carry out the business operations. They will have to heavy charges for adopting the cloud services and the cloud computing. They will have to pay a yearly revenue and monthly revenue. However, with the increase in sales and productivity, they can earn more revenues in coming future.
2. Brumby’s Bakery will have to hire employees having the technical knowledge and are ready to adapt to the latest technology and are capable of helping Brumby’s Bakery to meet the business deliverables (Roy and Venkateswaran 2014). Though they have to spend much to hire them, they are able to give them long-term benefits.
3. They will have to update their systems, hardware and software from time to time and for this reason, they will have to bear the extra cost (Nguyen, Nguyen and Cao, 2014). However, taking up the cloud service from cloud vendor like Microsoft Azure, they can get cost-effective IaaS services.
4. Brumby’s Bakery can suffer from the malware attack (Sun et al. 2014). The hackers can attack their system and can make their system vulnerable; Microsoft Azure can embellish the security of the company.

Reference to the Studies on Information Systems Failures:

The potential problems that will face by Dick Smith Foods are

1. Cost of website- The cost of implementing a fully-functional website is very much costly.
2. Cost of infrastructure- Brumby’s Bakery has to spend a lot to implement hardware and software and those must get compliance with the latest cloud computing services (Nguyen, Nguyen and Cao, 2014).
3. Security issues- Brumby’s Bakery can be attacked by the cybercriminals and their safety can get compromised. The cybercriminals can attack their system and can sabotage their system (Rezaei et al. 2014). In this way, the cybercriminals can gain control over Brumby’s Bakery system and database. The organisation can face loss due to this.
4. Legal issues- Brumby’s Bakery will have to follow the rules and the policies related to e-commerce.
5. Customer trust- The information system is another aspect. They must listen to the customer demands, if they fail to meet the demand, then they can lose the customer base and can face heavy losses.

Illustrate of Answer with Reference to Literature and any Relevant Examples

Woolworth Ltd. is one of the largest retail chain situated in various parts of Australia. They recently face heavy losses. The reason behind their failure is the lack of improvisation. They have not made use of information system well enough to enhance the sales and productivity of the company resulting in complete failure (Rezaei et al. 2014). They completely fail to meet up customers’ demands, make no innovation. Again they fail to deliver quality products.

Brumby’s Bakery uses information system in an effective way so that they can offer better customer service. The customers’ demands should be given priority and their demands should be met all the time (Acimovic and Graves 2014). They must focus on to deliver quality food products all the time. The food products must be examined all the time. There may be a chance that the food items they have delivered are all get rotten, Brumby’s Bakery must be responsible to make refunds or make necessary replacements.

Criteria that will be used to prove the proposed system meets requirements

Brumby’s Bakery can seek assistance from Microsoft Azure. Microsoft Azure can cater them secure and effective service that can protect them from intruders. Though Brumby’s Bakery will have to pay heavy to avail the service of Microsoft Azure, they can stay assured that the service will benefit them in the long run. The customers can purchase foods and can transact money online without any hassle.

Conclusion

It can be concluded from the above discourse that the information technology system can enrich Brumby’s Bakery business activities. The report has showcased Brumby’s Bakery organisation structure and the business operations in details. Brumby’s Bakery is willing to take up the information services to expand their market share and productivity. Brumby’s Bakery can face several issues while configuring the information service on their premises. The benefits that information system can bring to their system have been illustrated in details in the report. The recommendations have been made; it will help Brumby’s Bakery to root out the risks and vulnerabilities associated.  

References

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