Question:
Discuss About The Technology Changed Businesses Are Conducted?
Organisations long in business will have to understand that globalisation and information technology has changed the ways businesses are conducted including the mode of maintaining the accounts as well. B Bakery as is understood has been into the business of bakery for almost half a century and seen various ups and down. Subsequently the recent years have been some of the most flourishing years due to the introduction of newer products which are healthy as well as tasty. Unfortunately, B Bakery had to face the loss of some of the main account holders as they failed to provide some of its most wanted products at rates which equivalent to the one was offered by its competition. B Bakery continued to follow the age old method of accounting for its costs of products which failed to tell the firm about the places where the cost incurred is most and where they can cut down costs. Also due to lack of proper expertise as well and the absence of adequate business processes and ERP packages installed, the firm was unable to supply the goods at competitive rates as they were unable to find out how much profits can be sacrificed or reduced because of absence of a handy financial data. The firm lacked availability of instant and analytical information which would help them to take instant decision so as to retain the client. The said essay defines what the business of bakery desires of and how the ERP should be selected keeping in mind the purpose it is expected to serve for the firm. It also discusses about the fact that simply software selection is not the end, vendor selection is of utmost importance as well.
Well before the business process of a bakery is understood it is very crucial to understand as to what does a baker do. Basically a baker is a chef who specialises in baking pastries and breads of various kinds. He ensures to be the one who is involved in the procurement of raw materials, to baking the pastries and finally giving it a finishing touch by various kinds of icing which makes the cake look good. He also ensures to procure goods from the best of the places wherein the quality is not compromised and the price paid is the least as well.
For every business to run well, it is undoubtedly required to check upon the business processes being undertaken by the company and so is applicable for the business of B Bakery too. It is a business process which helps in achieving the goals of any organization and if the same is not well defined then the business may have to suffer in the long run. In today’s time of globalisation and increasing competition as well within a small business entity also, business process management (BPM) plays a crucial role as it helps to improvise various processes such as accounting, cost analysis etc (Rouse, 2016). There are various categories of a business process and each category has a separate role to play in the success of the organization. First and foremost is the operational process and B bakery’s operational process is to make the best quality bakery products and to improvise upon the existing range of products being offered as per the changing tastes of its customers (Borysowich, 2008). With regards the said process, B Bakery has successfully launched a range of product which is healthier and tastier as well, thus trying to deal with the operational process. The second one is the supporting processes which does not provide services or goods to the customers directly, but indirectly are a crucial part of the entity. They help to support, as the name says, to the main operations of the concern such as in the case of B Bakery, its main operational process is being backed up by accounting, workplace safety. The third one is the management process which help to determine, check upon and organize processes which are linked to the business procedures and systems, such as budgeting, strategic planning and adequate and proper communication within the organization (Veyrat, 2016). However in the case of B Bakery, though the support process was very much evident but the kind of support being provided was not as per the trend. The entity continued to follow the age old method of manual book keeping which gave results of the performance at the end of the year and there was no clue in the middle of the year as to where the costs could be controlled etc. Further to this, the management process also lacked because B bakery could not manage the activities as per the trend prevalent due to which the method of costing adopted was an old one which did not give him fruitful results. Lack of handy details was the main lack in the business process (Gratch, 2017). B Bakery although had updated its operational process but failed to understand that the support and the management processes are equally important and hence needs to be updated too.
Hence it can be rightly said that all these business processes are interlinked. Thus if there is an issue with the supply production, then it will automatically have an adverse impact on the sales and in the same fashion, if the business loses some of its customers then also its sales will decline (Considine et.al. 2005).
All the business processes discussed above are crucial and integral. But the main processes can be summarised into four different categories i.e. supply chain management, human resources, production and accounts. Amongst these four, accounts is of utmost importance specially from a business man’s viewpoint since it acts as a fuel for the success of the entire business process. B Bakery has been able to made tremendous profits and grow its business in the past few years but present scenario shows that it is facing some issues as it is losing its accounts. Even though the firm has appointed a specific accounting team who is accountable for the book keeping and the other reporting part of the accounts of the business, but the said accounting method fails to provide details about certain decision making actions. Because of the same the company failed to retain some of its key accounts as it could not provide them products at rates which were competitive with their competition. Finally it has realised that he company needs to improvise upon its present accounting method so as to be able to get certain data which would help them to take analytical decisions. Thus the data required for taking such a decision will come only via proper and in depth business process as well as market research. Basis these data, B Bakery will be able to take crucial and important decisions which would help it to regain back the lost customers and gain success again.
The business desires to install an accounting information system within its business and hence they are looking for investing in some of the available accounting software for the accomplishment of the said purpose. The key requirements for B Bakery presently is to improvise their present accounting methods, integration of the business processes and the accounting systems so that more sound decisions can be taken, putting in money in some of the accounting software packages which are available and tailoring it as per the business process and execution of an ERP and AIS for their business. ERP will support in integration of the business process and will help to provide a stronger base for the AIS (Bragg, 2017).
The bakery business demands for many major details from its various core business processes which would in turn help them to gain better performance of their business in the market. The business process cannot work well until and unless adequate information which would help in taking decisions are collected. Not only transactional data but also operational information is a must for processing and decision making. Hence the account process can provide adequate data only if it gathers and collects the same from the other business processes. Information related to payables, receivables, inventory, the margins that it is presently earning and what it can sacrifice, cost of production, etc are a must for a sound business decision. These data are a must for setting the price of its products at competitive rates.
For the acquisition of the said data from the business processes, it would need assimilation of all the business processes and the systems which are needed for the conduct of these processes. The better the assimilation, the better the business process and which would at the end yield better results financially. The AIS which is being installed over the ERP will help to give a structure to the entire firm and will in turn help it to gather, process, supervise, accumulate and recover financial data by the various analysts , managers, accountants, auditors and such others who need the information for the purpose of business decision making (Hall, 2016).
Apart from the same, ERP will help to assimilate the jobs and procedures of the business of B Bakery. The assimilation of both of them i.e. AIS and ERP will ultimately ensure that the data being presented more useful from the normal business data. Simply putting, AIS will give business estimating data by investigating past data.
A huge number of resources are at the dispense of the small business houses who are trying to achieve growth in their operational processes. These resources comprises of the various tactics that the companies should undertake, which areas calls for improvisation, how can they control on those things which they already possess etc. B Bakery is a firm which is lacking only technological expertise and not expertise in the field of baking. It needs to make an investment in an appropriate accounting information software (AIS) so that it is being able to beat the competition successful. The firm has a brand name, goodwill, talent but lacks accounting of its talent due to which it is failing into becoming a cost efficient company. Thus while investing into IT, the bakery firm should take into account some of the software features which would help it achieve its goal of price competitiveness.
It is not possible to gain grow and beat the competition, until and unless the age old methods are left behind. It has to ensure to chose an IT software which serves its various software purposes. B Bakery is aware that its biggest drawback lies in the field of accountancy, costing and analytical methodology thereby it needs execution of ERP as well as AIS within its business process. The accountant it has employed is a person with a conservative mindset. Thereby the software being selected should be such which would act as a ready reckoner for the owner to decide upon price cuts of certain products. Bakery firms business structures are generally very small to medium sized in nature and hence there software requirements would be one that offers a centralised system of recording transactions. The main thrust is on those features which are a must for the firm and without which the entire purpose of installing a software is a waste. Thus one of the main feature that the software should offer to a B Bakery is cost accounting. The ERP software will assimilate all the business procedures and hence there would exist a shared and centralised data center which would all the business procedures across the firm. This centralisation will ensure that adequate data is also available for the AIS process as well. This would ensure a more accurate processing.
B Bakery falls under the category of medium of large sized company because it has seventy employees and the revenue it generates surpassed $13.5 million in the previous year. Thus the kind of software it would require is one which would help in providing better detailed information which would help it to take quick decisions and ensure competition is kept away.
Basis the present industrial condition, three kinds of accounting information system software for such kind of a business is best suited. They are as under:
Basis the above descriptions, it is clear that B Bakery should consider installation of accounting solutions which fall under the second category i.e. small to medium business solutions (Diana, 2015).
The small and medium business solutions vendors, the most reputed ones are SAGE 100 ERP, Microsoft Dynamics and SAP by Design. Amongst these three, two accounting packages being chosen for comparing are SAGE 100 ERP and SAP By Design.
SAGE 100 ERP offers a number of deviations of the AIS software for these kind of enterprises. These are SAGE 100 Advanced ERP, SAGE 100 Standard ERP etc. This software has the capacity to support around half a century of users at the same time and that too for a varied range of accounting activities to be performed, economic activities, business intelligence, human resource, manufacturing, marketing and distribution and various CRM services. The solutions it provides can be tailored according to the requirements offered by these business procedures. The software is flexible enough to suit to the changing business needs as if the same is not then it becomes difficult for the medium enterprise to install new systems every now and then. Also the same is stable enough (Lobby, 2017).
It demands for Microsoft Windows environment and Microsoft SQL as well which would help in managing the backend. The same can be implemented and installed basis the platform used by the client. For the usage of the said software, wizard base support is available which ensures flawless assimilation within the modules of the software. The said software is less complicated thereby makes it easy for a novice also to understand its usage module. The return on investment will be maximum in this kind of a software due to the vigorous features it has to offer and the reports derived from it is very easily comprehendible. The users can easily add and delete the various user defined fields, rules of the business which helps to perform some specific tasks (Accounting Software World 2015).
It is a generalised accounting software package for business such as the size of B Bakery. Basically it helps to serve those small and medium enterprises which are searching for SaaS based cloud accounting solutions (Tur, 2013). It provides a huge array of professional services in conjunction with assimilated procedures for financing, CRM etc. this software has many advantages to offer such as the software is easily scalable i.e. new users can easily be added and the number of transactions can be increased to a great extent (Bearingpoint.com 2013). It supports those types of organizations as well who have their business spread across various places thereby also supports multi-currency transactions also (Sommer, 2017). The resources across the firm is better controlled. Further to this, since it uses cloud based software, therefore no specific hardware installation and development is needed (Kulkarni, 2015). Last but not the least is that such a kind of accounting software offers disaster recovery system as well and better security of data (Rahaman, 2012). The SaaS is very effective as it entails to provide such services which are needed by bigger organizations as well hence very useful if the SMB wants to expand its business (McCabe, 2010).
B Bakery is required to put in its money for the installation of a good AIS system as due tot he lack of the same, the firm is unable to provide its products at competitive rates. The said software would ensure connection of the various processes of the firm which would enable analysis of the transactional information and the operational data as well thereby ensuring the firm to take decisions which would be best for B Bakery. It is suggested to install SAGE 100 ERP accounting software, as it has various benefits to offer to B Bakery. The benefits it offers to B Bakery are as under:
A well connected, linked and assimilated network which would ensure all the business processes are put together via the software. Vendors, customers and the internal staff as well can easily unite to the one single system being installed via BYOD devices using mobiles and web interface managing CRM, HR, sales, purchases etc. This is a flawless method where the chances of a mistake is very less (Galani et.al. 2010).
Till date B Bakery had only raw data at its disposal due to which it was unable to take sound decisions. But the said system would ensure conversion of the raw data into a more meaningful form which would add benefits to the now business process already in vogue. The business intelligence functions can be accessed with the help of specialised and tailor-made dashboards and in turn help to find out the potential customers, vendors and what the people want from them. Thus the said accounting software will ensure creation of a strategy which would beat the competition(Peden, 2017).
SAGE 100 ERP offers an integrated CRM model which functions as a chaser with respect to sales, hence improvising upon the firmness, usability, preservation, incorporating, reporting etc. The users can easily interchange the facts base they possess with each other with the help of the said unit. Customer relationship is a must and without the same it becomes very difficult to retain them, hence the said module being a part of SAGE 100 ERP will be of great help to B Bakery (Sage Software Solutions., 2015).
SAGE 100 ERP offers a mobile sales module which may be required by B Bakery as the growing trends demands the same. It helps in faster processing of orders and payments as well which can further be fed into the main system irrespective of the time (Grabski et.al. 2002).
The company will easily be able to know what is its ROI since data is readily available in processed form. This would in turn ensure that B bakery takes quick decisions regarding its pricing without wasting much of its time(goism.com. 2016).
Conclusion
Thereby it is understood that for B Bakery to regain back its lost clientele, all it needs is to install an accounting software which would serve not only the present needs but also cover the future generation requirements as well. Investing in an accounting software calls for a huge capital expenditure hence the same should be done keeping in mind the future requirements as well. The overall business processes needs to be integrated, taken on board, simplified and scalable.
References
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