Strategic Information System Of 7 Eleven

The Current Organizational Structure

Discuss about the Strategic Information System Of 7 Eleven.

Strategic information system is one of the contemporary means and mechanisms that can be used by the business corporations for executing various operations and functions in an automated manner. The business corporations van make use of various information’s systems and tools for making the operations easier and this will also be affecting the productivity and efficiency of operations. There are number of tools and mechanisms that has been widely used by the business firms for delivering the desired quality of services by the customers (Kecmanovic et al., 2014). ERP and cloud computing are the two biggest examples of these mechanisms that is used by most of the business organizations for the betterment of the execution of the business practices. The below presented report is summarized on the strategic information systems used and adopted by 7 Eleven. 7-Eleven Stores Pty Ltd, Australia’s first choice in convenience, is a private company and is operating business practices by making use of various contemporary means and mechanisms and Strategic information system is one of them.

The company deals in providing food items to the customers. It is the private sector based company that believes in delivering the best quality and extreme tasty fast food for its customers. The company serves the customers in different cities of Australia and now planning to open their branches to overseas. In order to achieve the company goals, managers have decided to improve their current organizational structure. The organizational structure of the company is based on the divisional organizational structure which means that company focuses on making their marketing activities better (7 Eleven 2017).

The above figure represents the current divisional structure of 7 Eleven. The complete business process is managed by the CEO. CEO undertakes three different departments commercial division, residential division, and Government Division. These three departments are responsible for managing sales, marketing, and service of 7 Eleven. The employees work on the same areas of a market but under different departments. This makes the marketing process of the company more enhanced and appropriate. The most important thing to be considered in the marketing process is proper communication between the organizational departments. The potential problems of the business are discussed and correspondingly, decisions are taken. This type of structure allows employees to understand the accounting and economic status of the company (Karell, 2018).

Operational Problems

Operational problems in a business create inefficiency in work that has to be managed in an appropriate manner. The operational problems of 7 Eleven can be resolved by developing marketing strategies for their current business. Also, a change in the business processes can help the company to overcome the operational problems that are described below. The divisional organizational structure provides opportunities to the company to adopt local conditions of the market very quickly. This helps the managers to analyze the requirements of a market to develop effective strategies.

• Inefficiency- Many time employees are not able to deliver accurate information about the market which indeed leads to the inefficiency in interoperability of the business operations. This situation occurs because there are different functional areas to be managed by the employees which in turn results to inefficiency in work (Chofreh et al., 2014). To organize this issue, 7 Eleven has to develop a central organization. This will help employees to gather accurate information and will accordingly work on that.
• Cost- The set of business activities requires sufficient amount of resources including financial resources, human resources and many others for which cost is required. 7 Eleven needs efficient employees to organize the functional structure of their business. Effective management of cost is mandatory to have success in the economic growth of 7 Eleven.
• Errors- too many employees sometimes fail to manage business operations which lead to errors. Errors can occur in the accounting processes and also while calculating the overall cost that is used in sales and marketing processes of 7 Eleven.
• Rivalries- The employees do not receive incentives as per the work they accomplish for the different functional areas of the business. This creates internal conflicts among employees that affect business processes too. The collaboration of employees being in a team is important to achieve company’s goals and objectives (Accounting Tools, 2017).

There are three different types of software systems which can be used to develop a system which can be used to manage the business operations. System Acquisition Method is used to ensure that the current software system is updated (Costa, Ferreira, Bento and Aparicio, 2016). There are no errors in the system and it is capable of storing a large amount of information. A software system is utilized by the organizations to arrange the business processes according to the market needs and also with the increasing demand of customers.

• Commercial Software- This type of software are used to access the information system to run various application programs. Programs like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint are mostly used by 7 Eleven to develop any documentation or to design a business presentation. The commercial software can be updated automatically depending on its type. This functionality promotes employees to work with dedication as the software system can access with suitable speed (Eden, Sedera and Tan, 2014).
• Custom Software- 7 Eleven does not require specific hardware to complete their business processes. Therefore, custom software system will not be appropriate for their business. The demands of customers are accomplished using a commercial software as the company wants to focus on the sales and marketing functional areas only.
• ERP- The enterprise resource planning systems are used to integrate the business processes of an organization with the developed marketing strategies (Galliers and Leidner, 2014). There is a common database which is used to store the accessed information by the users which can be used for later use. It is used to keep track of the business statistics such as cost, profits, the effectiveness of marketing strategies, resources required and many more.

7 Eleven will be using the commercial software system to manage their business processes. The commercial software protects the application programs from virus and malware attacks. This system will be helpful for the employees to access the information conveniently.

The process starts with the login screen. Registered users can directly login to the system by entering their valid email address and password. New users have to sign up first then they will be able to log in. The next screen is to choose the departments. As mentioned above there will be three departments. After that, users have to choose which operation they will perform like sales, marketing or service. Users can access the details of the selected functional areas.

Control Problems- the commercial software system is the open source software which is more prone to vulnerabilities like cyber-attacks. 7 Eleven stores personal information regarding customer details, manufacturing of food details and the employee based information. Such data needs to be protected from the intruders.

• Sales Process- The commercial software system makes it difficult for the employees to accomplish their tasks as there is no guide or user manual to complete the sales process. Employees struggle hard to understand how to manage the sales, how to respond to a frequent request of customers and to manage the decision-making process (Goetsch and Davis, 2014).
• Transparency- Some of the commercial software systems does not have the required application programs to manage the needs of employees. Due to this, 7 Eleven face issues regarding accountability and managing human resources. This problem also affects the customer-relationships as the employees are not able to effectively communicate with the customers.
• Flexibility- APIs affect the accessibility of the commercial software system as the 7 Eleven employees need proper guidance to access the system. Also, the requested change made by the customers are affected due to the slow accessibility of the system (Safari Books, n.d.).

Frauds that are possible in the system-

• Malware Attacks
• Cyber Attacks

These are some of the frauds that occur in the commercial software system. This issues can be resolved using effective anti-virus and anti-malware software which will safeguard the crucial information of 7 Eleven.

7 Eleven stores Pty. Ltd has a vision of offering the best quality of products and services by fulfilling the desires and expectations of the customers of the customers. And for attaining the desired targets the business entity is making use of various systems and software. For instance, accounting systems are used for managing and storing the data of the business firm, the transactions executed on daily basis, the data of the customers, and also for managing the expenses and the revenues earned and for maintaining the other accountability factors associated with the firm (Hall and James, 2014). The best solution for this case is that the business entity is required to make adoption of ERP system for managing the operations and executing the related business practices. ERP is an accounting management system that can be used by the business organization for managing the core functions and the departments. Moreover, 7 Eleven can mainly make use of this software package for managing the accounting transactions executed within the business entity. The development of ERP systems is beneficial for the organizations to receive profits from their field of business. There is a requirement for a planning model to evaluate the effectiveness of business strategies.  

System Acquisition Method

This system has gained a high level of significance in the past few years and this is due to intensification of the competitive environment. As the business corporation is a well-established brand name in the market-place and hence there is the high level of requirement for the adoption of this accounting system in the organizational structure.

7 Eleven has been recognized as the first retail convenience store all over the world. ON the basis of the research executed it has been noted that the business corporation is operating its business through its 600 stores all over Australian regions and 55000 stores all over the globe thus making the entity world’s second-largest private company (More 2018).

Competitive advantage can be achieved by effectively managing the cost of the company. The company owners have to review about the strengths and weakness and how they can achieve the trust of customers. Leaders play a vital role to bring standards for a company (Hill, Jones and Schilling, 2014). Another important thing to follow is to focus on the quality of product or service that is delivered to a customer. Besides price, customers more often look out for the best quality products. Therefore, should identify the market demands and create business strategies. 7 Eleven is the excellent performers in terms of managing the resources like financial and human resources. Taking into consideration the leaders of a market, the staff members collaborate effectively and give their best to the organization (Romney and Steinbart, 2009). The company manager looks after the hiring of skilled candidates, the accounts manager checks on the bill payments and the sales/marketing officer are responsible for creating and monitoring advertisements for the company. The team of graphic designers continuously prepare the trending’s creative for food pictures and other related creative. Supplier of the company brings the best details about retailers and wholesalers to supply the food items (Hunton, JMcEwen and Wier, 2015). They are also responsible for contacting with other food dealers. Investors plan for creating better opportunities for 7 Eleven is to expand their business globally. These leaders are focused on improving the current business process by either replacing it with a different business strategy or adopting a new technology to manage them.

• Inefficiency- The out-dated commercial systems leads to inefficiency in business operations. This problem needs to be resolved as this could imbalance the information and make the sequence of information inaccurate. This affects the profitability of the company compared with other competitors in the market (IES 2016).
• Errors in processes- Inaccuracy in the data affect the specifications of each project. This also affects the efficiency inaccessibility of the system.
• Less Storage Space- the commercial software system does not provide sufficient storage space for the application programs that need to be installed for an information system.
• Maintenance- the commercial software system requires maintenance cost to update the system for better accessibility and reliability (Islam et al., 2010). Frequent expenses cause the decrease in finance of the company.
• File Organization- manual records are difficult to manage in the organizations like 7 Eleven. The sequential arrangement of information is important which is not possible by commercial systems (Richardson, Chang and Smith 2014). They require hardware to support the installed application programs.

Use of ERP system will be beneficial for the company to manage both internal and external business processes. Such systems are efficient to use and do not require much maintenance. The ERP systems are automated which require less manual operations (Jirava and Toseafa, 2017). The benefit from ERP systems is that these provide integration of data with the current business processes. It guides the employees to perform regular activities on an information system (Liebowitz and Frank, 2016). These systems are reliable to use. Reduction of manual work by using automated information system is the best suitable solution for 7 Eleven. Manual records create inaccuracy and redundancy in data. It is important to maintain consistency of the company based information.

Identify Any Control Problems in the System and What Sorts of Fraud are Possible in this System?

It can be recommended for 7 Eleven to develop effective business strategies for their business. These strategies should be based on the current statistics of the marketplace and the requirements of customers. The company can also make use of effective graphics to make the advertisements more attractive to the target audience. At the back end process, a company should use a database system. This will allow users to store a large amount of information and can use multiple operating systems at a time. The company should the most convenient option for expanding their business such as to implement an affordable software system which is upgraded and automated.

Conclusion

After summing up the above-presented analysis it has been inferred that the strategic information system is one of the integral mechanism that will be proven beneficial for the business organization in various operations and functionalities. These systems make the execution of operations smoother and easier and hence 7 Eleven has been recommended to make adoption of the systems for the betterment of the business.

References

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