The Corporate Strategy of Plunders - Case Study Example

For many decades, Plunder’s has established itself as one of the most premiere companies internationally. Plunder’s has created data warehousing thathas allowed the company to understand the customers, track inventory, and monitor financials. All of these components are integrated in one dashboard that has harnessed BI. The term data centric refers to software architecture in which databases play a huge role in defining the infrastructure, This can also mean Business Intelligence, data science and other crucial elements that define the organization’s zeal to capture data. In addition, data centric revolves around ERD(entity relationship diagrams). It would be an ERD with a transaction processing system because it would process transactions at a seamless manner. I think the company should definitely consider an ERP system for many reasons. First and foremost, an ERP system will allow them to have a seamless integration along with a strong BI intelligence system. Prior to vendors really getting into databases, Microsoft was the only hottest company that was making software for database. Microsoft Access was a hot software that allowed users to create entity relationship databases and manipulate information. Companies such as Quest Technologies came with software such as Toad, that supplement Oracle 11G and made the whole process extremely seamless. From a corporate standpoint, decisions are created from top-up approach in which different sectors of markets are analyzed. At this level, companies decide where to invest or divest in terms of the overall business mix they wish to develop today and in the future. In essence, the corporate strategy of Plunder’s is a single business strategy because it deals in the restaurant business. Plunder’s company integrates different quality management factors in its business process. To ensure quality which consists of demographics, product, price and location, Plunder’s leans towards to implement BI in their business strategy, “Plunder’s established a BI strategy, which it termed "Plan to Win," with key metrics centered on place, people, products, and promotions. From there, Plunders built standard questions and scorecards for mystery shoppers.  They needed a way to accurately measure the customer experience. They wanted to review everything from top to bottom from an internal perspective. The scorecards are now in use in 29,000 of the companys 31,000 stores and are one of the critical reasons behind the companys improved performance the last few years, and this strategy also helped in contributing in other factors as well, such as menu changes and expanded hours at many locations” (Britt, Oct 17th 2007). The mission of the Plunder’s Company consists of delivering efficiency in all facets of operations which can be achieved efficiently as they have planned to implement BI that would certainly help them to pinpoint all the KPIs which positively assist them to keep track on their progress and standardize all the processes within organization. Standardization of the product variety plays the vital role to assure quality of different items. For example, Plunder’s excels in standardization by simplifying each process on cooking food and maintain the same menu nationwide. In addition, it has excelled in brand equity by having to ensure cooking regularity, such as food is coherently cooked and size is standardized, all this standardization and accuracy of the process can only be accomplished via precise analysis of business data and monitoring of business processes and this can only be achieved via having strong infrastructure of BI and that’s what Plunder’s strategy is. Plunder’s plan is to have centralized information from all the sources (e.g. point-of-sale (POS) system, equipment monitoring, etc) where all sorts of information, real-time feeds and legacy information, can be monitored and analyzed in most efficient and precise way. Plunder’s ‘innovate’ project has laid the foundation of such advanced technology and provided capability to handle and monitor all sort of business in most precise and informative way since all the business information needs to be looked in multi-dimensional ways for clear and concise analysis and that’s what exactly Plunder’s is trying to achieve via BI implementation to their system. 1) Oracle ERP system, which can handle most day-to-day business functions, would serve as the hub. POS and other devices use business intelligence software to gather sales information and marketing data, which is then transferred to an Oracle database for analysis (“Plunders offers customers”, Feb 11th 2004). This would help Plunder’s to have robust information of their business processes and assist them monitoring the progress of their business in the terms of sales, revenues, inventory management, staff allocation, location of the business in terms of which is profitable or unprofitable, and also gives them the head start to mitigate any risk. According to Dill, “Plunders saw the combination of its POS and in-store processor software as a strategic advantage. The secondary benefit was we knew it would increase annual sales by tens of thousands of dollars for every second of time [it took off of each transaction]” (Gallagher, July 2nd 2003). The main objective of using Oracle software with other systems is to perform integration among different systems so everything is centralized thus the information. 2) Their BI approach also help them to perform product management that is to monitor the quality of product and tools that are used for business, this all can be achieved by Simple Network Management Technology (SNMP) which monitors every essential piece of equipment in each location “with the addition of simple electronic monitoring devices, a network connection, and an SNMP management information base (a piece of software that interprets the data from the device for the monitoring system), that "intelligent device" can be nearly anything—including a freezer, a fryer, or a soda dispenser” (Gallagher, July 2nd 2003).The main objective of this approach is to monitor every equipment in the kitchen and store remotely or from onsite to maintain the productivity, quality, and consistency of their products. 3) The beauty of their BI planning is the availability of meaningful and informative ‘Dashboard’ for the decision makers. Plunders plan is to make things convenient for executives and managers by providing flexibility to see business information at any time of day from anywhere such as how sales of any product at any store is proceeding, “this would give Plunders executives a complete, instant picture of the companys operations around the world, and, in theory, the ability to act quickly when necessary to adjust the deployment of promotions and supplies to meet demand. Executives would be able to analyze data from all over the world from their Web browser—it would give them a dashboard for driving Plunders business” (Gallagher, July 2nd 2003). Monitor The benchmark to track inventory and financials is critical for success. Plunder’s has embedded a strong QA monitor that replenishes inventory via automatic notifications based on sales. For instance, if the sales of French fries exceed a certain amount on daily basis, a notification will be sent from the store to the warehouse to supply them back with the ingredients. Apart from sales monitoring, they also have technology to monitor all sorts of equipment thus helps in maintaining standard of their products. This rectifies human errors as well as dynamically produces BI reports in ad hoc basis. “One of the major challenges in that effort was to develop common metrics for the numerous countries where the company has operations. Now, Plunders uses 130 metrics to produce 80 different reports. We needed a way to accurately measure the customer experience; we wanted to review everything from top to bottom” (Britt, Oct 17th 2007).The luxury of having well informed dashboard is to facilitate decision making based on accurate and precise facts and figures. The refresh dashboard allows managers to monitor inventory and sales progress real-time basis; sales, expenses, and inventory reflects from all facets. Moreover, it reduces cycle time and allows managers to effectively monitoring of business operations since dashboards need to convey a large amount of information quickly, in a way it’s compelling and intuitive-Plunder’s delivers it from a micro to a macro approach. Act BI indeed helps MC Donald’s to take action in real time on the basis of accurate and precise facts and figures. Their BI system not only supports the common tactical purposes of data warehousing for retrieving historical information and knowledge, but it also delivers real-time support to drive actions that help them to react instantly to the events as they occur. Furthermore the functionality of automated analysis allows them to initiate counteractive actions to enhance and improve business processes. Performance Measurement I propose that Plunder’s uses the following metrics as outlined below: Sales, Average Sales per week, Inventory, Expenses, Equity. These benchmarks are designed from the brick-and-mortar sales aspects. In addition, inventory can be cascaded to understand the variance between sales and cost of goods sold. This allows the higher executives to make a decision on what products are region based. Hence, this process will not only be streamlined in all chains of Plunder’s but aligns itself with a Six Sigma Lean process. Data Warehouse When it comes to data warehousing, Plunder’s has taken an innovative approach to analyze their data needs. When customers order through the POS (point-of-sale) systems, a daily report of all items sold is sent to the manager and the higher executives. They also have equipment monitoring function that sends alert to the business if any equipment is malfunctioning or performing per standards. This report will also outline aspects of inventory that may be low in a color formatting, similar to a dashboard for easy GUI. Data warehouses solution assists Plunder’s with convenient and cost-effective solution, and also provide central repository for data that comes from all branches of business and from other sources(POS or from malfunctioning equipment), which helps in managing and analyzing data in manageable way. Also the online analytical processing (OLAP) capability helps Plunders in driving logical strategy which is based on precise analysis. Apart from analysis, their approach also assists in consolidating data in meaningful format which allows managing and allocating information more effectively across all the areas of business thus helps in making more informed decisions. Along with current and real time data, it also provides historical data which is essential in building KPI and performance metrics thus helps decision makers to focus on their priority data that is critical for operation. Also this approach allows them to have more robust and informative automated online reporting and meaningful dashboard which allows company’s managers to focus on analyzing data instead of spending time on creating reports. Works Cited Plunders offers customers a bigger taste of technology. (11th Feb, 2004). Retrieved from www.computing.co.uk/ctg/analysis/1848922/Plunders-offers-customers-bigger-taste-technology Read More