Coles: Overview, Vision and Strategic Objectives

Coles is a retail company operating in Australia and New Zealand. They have four main groups: liquor and fuel, food, Kmart, Target, and office works. Coles' vision is to be the best retailer in every market they operate in. Their mission is to supply customers with value, convenience, and superior service. Coles' strategic objectives include reducing grocery prices, increasing economic market, and investing in non-price competition strategies. They face business problems such as ineffective training programs, poor inventory control, and inflexible work hours. Coles' business requirements include determining network traffic matrix and ISP connection.

Coles
1.0 Introduction
Company is the second large company after Woolworths that mainly operates retail stores in
Australia and in New Zealand. The company mainly operates its store under four groups
categorized as follows; liquor and fuel, food, Kmart, Target and office works. Liquor & fuel
group and food mainly comprises of supermarkets, Coles express, Coles online and Coles liquor.
The brands of the supermarkets is composed of Bi-lo and Coles brands that mostly offers a wide
range of fresh groceries, food as well as general merchandise. The Coles liquor operate the four
major brands namely; vintage cellars, liquor land, 1st Choice Liquor Superstore and Theo’s. The
Coles express deals with fuel and convenience stores in Australia. The Kmarts are mainly the
discount stores that mainly offer a wide range of items such as; toys, electrical appliances,
sporting goods as well as outlets of Kmart tyre and auto service. Office works deals with brands
like office work superstores, Harris technology and office works business direct. Office works
offer various products like office furniture, printing services, stationary. Coles Group Limited
was formerly known as Coles Myer Ltd. and changed its name to Coles Group Limited in
November 2006. The company was founded in 1914 and is based in Tooronga, Australia. As of
November 23, 2007, Coles Group Limited operates (Montagnana-Wallace, Barber, &
Montagnana-Wallace, 2013) as a subsidiary of Wesfarmers Ltd.
1.1 Vision Statement
The Coles/Myer group had a mission "to be the best retailer in every market in which we
operate" with Coles Supermarkets positioning "serving you better".
1.2 Mission Statement

We are innovative industry leaders who supply customers with value, convenience and superior
service. The Coles Supermarkets positioning statement is 'Serving you better', which focuses on
operating excellence, consumer proposition and innovation
2.0. Strategic Objectives
Generally the prices of the grocery items have been going up in both of the companies due to
funding by the consumers. In most cases, the behavior of consumers is not perfect. The cost of
kilo of food which has been processed mostly ranges from 10 to $20 per a kilo. This implies that
consumers get more value by purchasing fresh goods.
Cole’s economic market has been increasing in the recent past despite intensifying competition
from Woolworths Company and Aldi. A reduction in price of items at Coles’ supermarkets
helped boost the liquor and food sales by almost 4.7 per cent during the first quarter of 2016
financial year. Food and liquor sales rose by 3.6 per cent. The growth in sales is mostly fueled by
a slash in liquor and food prices by 1.3 per cent. According to parent company Wesfarmers’
chief financial officer, Coles’ economic market has been growing significantly. Coles’
achievement in gaining large economic market in tough competitive markets in Australia and
New Zealand has added a lot of pressure to Woolworths Company which has been struggling
with failing profits and sluggish sales. Cole’s retail supermarkets in the recent past have been
successful in marketing campaigns which has contributed to a greater success of the company.
This is attributed to large investments in non-price completion strategies which include market
research, invention and innovation in production of goods and services among others. Coles’
economic market has increased in the first quarter which is major achievement in this kind of
competitive environment.

3.0 Business Problems
 Training programs are perhaps not as effective as anticipated.
 The sales volume of a product is not picking up.
 Inventory control is not effective
 Some members in organization are not advancing in their careers.
 The introduction of flexible work hours has created more problems than it has solved in
many companies.
4.0 Business Requirements
One of the most important aspects of designing a new business’s network is determining what its
needs will be. Based upon the requirements of the organization, this will dramatically impact
how much available bandwidth will need to be required from the ISP connection in order to
sustain optimal business operations and to meet the business requirements. One of the methods
in which network designers can estimate the amount of network traffic there might be is with a
network traffic matrix. A traffic matrix represents the volumes of traffic from sources to
destinations in a network (Haddadi & Bonaventure, 2013, Chapter 3). Included within the
matrix are specific departmental networking needs for all of the departments within an
organization.
Networking Traffic Matrix
Supermarket stores
Department Type of requirement Total Bandwidth for

Department
Accounting & Tax Email, Accounting Software
(AccPac, Smart Client,
Insight), MS Dynamics and
Access to banking websites,
Shared Drive Access
Approximately 50Mbps-
100Mbps
Design Email, Project Management
Software (Spitfire), Design
Software (SPEXX), Shared
Drive Access
Approximately 25Mbps-
50Mbps
Project Management Email, Project Management
Software (Spitfire), Shared
Drive Access
Approximately 25Mbps-
50Mbps
Contracts &
Adminstration
Email, Shared Drive Access,
Project Management Software
(Spitfire)
Approximately 25Mbps-
50Mbps
Legal Email, Shared Drive Access,
Access to various websites
Approximately 25Mbps-
50Mbps
Human Resources Email, Shared drive access,
private printer access, various
website access
Approximately 25Mbps-
50Mbps
Operations Email, Shared drive access,
Accounting Software access
Approximately 25Mbps-
50Mbps

(Smart Client)
Total Bandwidth for
Organization
Approximately 200Mbps-
400Mbps
Determining Reasonable Estimates
There are many different techniques whenever it comes to determining reasonable estimates for
organizational wide use of Internet related resources. One of the many ways to determine an
estimate that was disclosed in the Pluralsight activity implementing a Basic Network was to use
network analyzers (CiscoWorks, NetFlow, IP SLA, and NBAR) to see the networking traffic
taking place in real time. With the use of such networking tools to monitor networking activity,
network designers and or engineers can really hone in on not only what networking traffic is
taking place but also how much of it is taking place.
Required ISP Connection
Considering that the tentative total from the network traffic matrix for networking bandwidth
was approximately 200Mbps-400Mbps, this implies that a connection coming from the ISP
would need to be 1000Base T, in which is Gigabit Ethernet, or Fiber Optic speeds. As a network
designer or engineer, you always want to have more head room in terms of bandwidth then
technically needed because designers need to make networks scalable. What if the organization
grows? Network designers need to keep this into consideration and that the ISP connection that
is supplying the main pipe to the Internet is fast enough to sustain normal business operations.