Management Information Systems - Snacks Now - Case Study Example

MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS Tutor University Date Management Information systems Entrepreneurship is increasingly becoming a choice for the many passionate and jobless individuals in Australia. People are becoming more innovative to match the ever growing and competitive nature of enterprises. In order to stand this competition, organizations are encouraged to adopt effective business information systems. This paper will evaluate the management information systems in a case study of Snacks Now and give a detailed report about the same. First, to understand the business profile of snacks now, an analysis of the organization's mission, functions, its products and services and general organization is looked into. The e-commerce retail company sells groceries and have fast foods delivered to its customers. It processes its orders using a smartphone app or the website. Its mission is delivering fast foods at night and even extend this time if need be. The company functions on a good management system (Flowers & Edeki, 2013). It has a junior manager and a driver. It plans to expand the employee base as other new positions emerge. In terms of its organization, the company can be classified as a small scale organization. In has it owners at the top, a junior manager and a contracted IT solution company to take care of its information systems. Additionally, it has also contracted an advertising company to take care of its marketing needs. Among the products it plans to offer are dairy, groceries and vegetables. These products will not only be offered through its outlet but also through other food outlets too. It plans to put a reward system that will take care of the needs of the customers in Adelaide and some loyal customers of the supermarket. It other services will be order delivery at the door step and giving some reward points for their loyal customers (Luo, 2017). Snacks Now has four business processes in which every process has a sub process. Its processes include the information management that involves checking the availability of the product, updating prices of the products and connecting with the data base products of its outlets and the mother supermarket. Its second process is the customer management that involves registration and award of social and loyalty points (Tilley & Rosenblatt, 2017).Another process is sales that entails customers checkout, processing invoice and lastly order and payment processing. Lastly, it deals in process of managing delivery. This process involves delivering to a specific customer address and order collection. Two of the above processes can be used to explain the models, that is sales and information management business processes. First, let’s consider the information management process. It first starts by checking the products and connecting them to either the food store or the supermarkets. In case they are connected to the supermarket, then the list of groceries is evaluated while if connected to the food outlets, then the list of fast food stores are put into consideration. Every Wednesday night, the prices are updated and pout on the company's website (Reynolds, 2003). Secondly, considering the sales business process model, the interconnectedness of the customers and the sales unit is exploited. First, the customer registers to the website, they then login and makes orders if logins are successful. Upon receiving the order, the sales unit checks the eligibility of a customer for the social points, loyalty or discounts before preparing a sales invoice. Payment is then verified via PayPal and the customer details updated before the order ids prepared and delivery made. There are some activities that the business must consider doing. Such activities include choice and prioritization of the operating system, setting up an online payment system, hiring a junior manager and purchasing of a car for delivery of products among other things, states Luo, (2017).At the same time the company should consider setting up a quality control system for the products and training their staff especially for the packaging and delivering section. The company could also consider hiring more staff for their product delivery and provide substantive information about the frequently asked questions. The last possible consideration is what the company won't do, it will not deliver products more than one day, product delivery without customer notification and lastly, it will not deliver products without the information of expiry dates (Tilley & Rosenblatt, 2017). According to Luo, (2017), scope statement for Snacks Now would contain information and details of the project name that is “the Snack Now system development project and prepared by IT foundry. It will also contain a justification of the project. This will explain the engagement of the foundry in the planning, designing and development of a good e-commerce system for Snack Now. This platform targets at making the processes of ordering and delivery of fast foods easy and convenient. Proper implementation of this business will improve customer satisfaction and give better services to customers. A scope statement contains the description of the business, which is how Snack Now will conduct its businesses. Its scope of information collection and analysis is included here. Another component of the statement is the project strategy. This will involve gathering of information about the project and involving the IT experts in designing, coding and troubleshooting in their apps (Flowers & Edeki, 2013). Other components of the statement includes, project deliverables, acceptance criteria, constraints and assumptions, such assumptions states that the business will be successful considering that action of the system planning that is done. The organizational structure for the company is simple and easy to implement. At the top are the owners, Dionne and John. They are then followed by a junior manager, a driver and then the customers at the lowest part of the chart. Figure 1: Organogram of the company It is important that fact finding be done for proper establishment of good information systems. Several approaches of fact finding could be done by the organization, for example they could conduct interviews, review documents, conduct a market research or making observations on the current trends (Reynolds, 2003). Several other factors needs to be put into consideration for the determination of the appropriateness of each method, for example, the cost, the benefits, the likely time to be taken among others. The general assumption determining choice is cost and it is calculated considering the service fee of $ 95 per hour for the analyst. According to Tilley & Rosenblatt (2017), there are several systems requirement checklist. In this project, the most modeling tasks that are likely to be required will be evaluated here. System requirements are important features that must be added for the satisfaction of business requirement and its users. They serve as benchmarks of measuring the acceptability of the finished system. The requirements fall in the following five categories, input, output, performance, process and control. For the case of snacks, the following examples are relevant for the output: Website or the mobile app must have ability to display order invoice for the customer while at the same time displaying the order details for the manager. It must also display the menu for both the supermarket and the foods stores. For the input examples, it is the manager that must feed the menu in terms of prices and supermarket outlets. Additionally, the customer needs to have their details registered in the system especially for the first time. Lastly, in terms of process examples, the website or the mobile app must process and compile the order. It must also calculate the order estimate plus all the charges. The system must also be in a position to calculate the social points and the loyalty points earned by the customer. It is assumed that the mobile app or the website of the company will support the online payments system. Going by the requirements mentioned in the previous section, there is substantive data insufficiency hence expert judgment is important here. With an average tolerance of +/- 1hour, the output, input, process will all have a time estimate of 3hours. The system model will have a tolerance of +/- 2hours and a time estimate of 9hours. The total time estimate is 18hours with a total tolerance of 13 hours. The assumption here is that each task should not take more time since the project scope is limited. Going by the service cost of $95 per hour, the cost estimate for the output, input and process is $ 190. That of the system models is $570 while the total cost estimate is $1140. The project is technically feasible since it has the technical resources that might be needed to make the system more effective. The resources needed now simple like the smart phone app that the company can easily afford to develop. They also need a computer with the latest specifications. The software and hardware system present can be used now and in the future. The interface is user friendly and easy to use. It is evident that the company is technically feasible (Piscopo, 2017). In terms of operational feasibility, the company will have its system designed as requested by the owners. This will help them gain support by the stakeholders. The system is also limited to competition in Adelaide. Users will also benefit from the system since its menu will get regular updates. Users will need very little time to adapt since they are used to the online services like Facebook. The system greatly reduces work force since it is only required that few or single person management. Lastly, the customers will be satisfied by the services that the company provides, this will include the online shopping and faster delivery that makes the shopping experience even more fun. Ethical analysis Amendments are needed by the organization that will not incur much cost but instead deliver long term benefits to the larger community while at the same time fostering growth in supporting industries. In this case, a recommended amendment is the inclusion of knowledge base to the information system. This knowledge base will allow the users to search through some broad and wide range of products that could be available in the company's website (Shelly & Rosenblatt, 2012).The users can be recommended with some set of products in which they can explore. Special offers of products can be displayed together with the popular products. Figure 2: Core of ethical considerations A possible business for suggestion includes the addition of organic products to their inventory while making sure that they are supplied by the local producers. This will help guarantee the long term benefits and community sustainability. Piscopo, (2017), argues that adopting the recommendations will mean customer satisfaction scores are increased. This will help improve the businesses and their related services they provide to the community at large. Additionally, the inclusion of organic products will make the enterprise more profitable as they also gain the customer's goodwill. The customers who like organic products will be happy hence this will widen the scope of the business without any serious investment. More people will engage in organic farming upon realizing that the customers like organic products. This will increase intensity of farming thereby also improving the environment. The company should focus on ethical operations and deal in ethical business. In this regard, they should avoid giving too much workload to the junior manager. Again working late at night might cause a security breach to the manager. Moreover, the working environment is also not safe. Here the assumption is that it is ethical problem that makes the employee to work alone in an unsafe environment. According to Ravindran, (2017), if decisions are made without the ethical considerations in place, it will be difficult to find an employee who will be willing to work in such an environment. Even if someone offered, there would be work related dissatisfaction and insecurity that could lower their performance. In such considerations, all ethical factors must be analyzed wholesomely. This means that virtue ethics, fairness, utiliatarism and common good must all be considered. The ethical problems could lead to three possible responses, first, the employees can accept the job but feel unsafe, they could not accept the job completely and others might not worry about security. Whichever way, the best response would not be to accept the job given security and related threats. Peer review is an important component of feedback collection of the performance of an individual in a project. Working in a group allows the understanding of the working styles of every member. This could either positively or negatively impact the aggregate output of the group. From here, the merits can be carried forward for next projects while the demerits can be set for future improvements (Shelly & Rosenblatt, 2012). Reference Flowers, R and Edeki, C 2013. ‘Business process modeling notation’, International Journal of Computer Science and Mobile Computing, vol. 2, no. 3, pp.35-40. Luo, A 2017, ‘Group meetings’, Learning Forum, Information Systems Management, 28 March, viewed 28 March 2017 . Piscopo, M 2017, Project scope statement, viewed 20 March 2017, . Reynolds, G 2003, Ethics in Information Technology, Thomson (chapter 1) Sankari Ravindran, S 2017, ‘Group meetings’, Learning Forum, Business requirements, Information Systems Management, 28 March, viewed 28 March 2017, . Shelly, GB & Rosenblatt, HJ 2012, Systems Analysis and Design, 9th edition, Cengage Learning. Tilley, S & Rosenblatt, H 2017, Systems Analysis and Design, 11th edition, Cengage Learning. Read More