The Benefits and Risks of Implementing a Point of Sales System in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises: A Case Study of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery

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IT
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Executive Summary
The purpose of this report is to understand the need of technology in business. The report takes
into consideration the example of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery in order to evaluate the
business benefit of implementing a new point of sales system. The organization previously
maintained manual registers for record keeping that affected the business in a negative manner.
The implementation of the POS system helped the organization in increasing the operational
efficiency. The advantages and disadvantages of the new POS system is discussed in the report
along with the associated security risks and the approaches to address those risks.

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Table of Contents
Introduction..........................................................................................................................3
1. The Advantages and Disadvantages of POS..................................................................3
2. Achieving Competitive Advantage with the new POS....................................................6
3. The Advantages of having Centralized Database...........................................................6
4. POS System in Facilitating Decision-Making................................................................7
5. Recommended option of Telecommunication: LAN......................................................9
6. Risks that POS bring........................................................................................................9
Conclusion.........................................................................................................................10
Recommendations..............................................................................................................10
References..........................................................................................................................11
Appendix............................................................................................................................13

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Introduction
Use of computers and information system are essential to maintain and manage almost
every business irrespective of its size and type. Not only the large business enterprises, but also
smaller businesses are making use of technology for easier management and to gain business
profits. The use of technology is small and medium sized organizations are limited mainly
because these organizations do not have the expertise and the resources of that of large business
organizations. The report discusses the adoption of point of sales (POS) system in Four Seasons
Greenhouse and Nursery that is located in Colorado. This nursery is similar to many other
businesses and garden centres that make use of manual registers in tracking and maintaining the
inventory, sales and details of the products. The aim of the report is to establish the fact that the
benefits of technology in small and medium sized enterprises are just as crucial to the business
operations as it is for the large organizations (Pearlson, Saunders and Galletta 2016). The
information tracking with the help of manual registers resulted in negligible profit for the
organization or business loss. The Four Seasons nursery adopted POS system in the year 2008
that helped the organization in gaining certain business benefits (refer to appendix). The report
discusses the benefits, advantages and disadvantages of the new POS system along with the risks
associated with the use of such information system in the following paragraphs.
1. The Advantages and Disadvantages of POS
Point of sales systems are mainly designed to optimize the daily business processes. It
helps in eliminating the need of paper work that is associated with the tracking of sales and
inventory management. This process helps in saving a lot of time as it eliminates the need of
manual calculations (Stair and Reynolds 2013). The use of POS therefore improves the