Information Technology in Countdown Supermarket

Explore the role of IT in Countdown Supermarket, its vision, gap analysis, proposed system, security measures, and IT measurements. The article also discusses the challenges faced by the organization and how IT is helping the supermarket in making better decisions.

Running head: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Information Technology
[Name of the Student]
[Name of the University]
[Author note]

2INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Introduction:
Countdown is a supermarket situated in New Zealand which is a full-service supermarket
chain and subsidiary of the Progressive Enterprise which itself is subsidiary of the Australian
Woolworths Limited. This is a larger than the other average supermarkets placed in New
Zealand. The first store of Countdown supermarket started its business in 1981 and by the year
of 2016 it has almost 184 (countdown.co.nz, 2018). This is considered as the largest and the only
single supermarket chain which runs in New Zealand with a number of stores. But despite of this
the rival four square chain has the largest number of premises which includes smaller retail
stores in the rural areas of New Zealand.
By the year of 2017 there were almost 184 Countdown supermarkets which operates in the North
and the South Island of New Zealand. The organization consists of various operations whereas
the major operations are handled by the Progressive Enterprises head office which is situated in
the city of Mangere, Auckland. This stores have been distinguished into 10 major areas. Each
area consists of an Area Manager and along with this all this areas are supported by the National
Operations Manager (countdown.co.nz, 2018). But in previous days the areas were separated into
North and South regions and each of them are having 5 areas. Besides this the pricing and the
specials were separated into two major regions and this included the North Island and the South
Island. The northern region has been further divided in sub-divisions and this includes the Upper
and the Lower. Besides this Countdown Supermarket has also been associated with providing
New Zealand a wide range of online grocery delivery service by making use of the online
grocery shop.

3INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
IT Vision of the Organization: Countdown Supermarket:
Along with the increase in globalization of the retailing industry while considering them
in terms of their points-of-sale and their points-of-supply. Along with this the spending upon the
information technology (IT) by the Countdown supermarket has increased in a significant way.
The role that is played by the IT has an increasingly important role in the management of
complex operations inside the supermarket (Laudon & Traver, 2013). Supermarkets might not be
needing any type of IT like the service-oriented businesses but certainly this does not mean that
they cannot make use of the computers in their daily activities. Like many other supermarkets
countdown supermarket has also adopted complex computer systems which is associated with
allowing them to regulate many of their daily practices. This initially helps the business leaders
to obtain more information which initially helps them in taking decision along with adaptation of
automatic processes. All this helps the supermarket in saving money as well as money.
Gap Analysis:
Knowledge about the Market, along with the control of data and information acts as the
major key responsible for the purpose of obtaining a competitive advantage in the retail industry
of New Zealand. In today’s world it has been seen that the Markets are growing in continuous
way and besides it is becoming more complex day by day (Laudon & Laudon, 2016). Besides
this the simple process of retailing in Countdown has initially started the deployment of more
advanced retail information systems for the purpose of coping up with all the transactions that
are involved in the various processes of Countdown.
The main reason lying behind the need of the new IT infrastructure by the retailer
Countdown has been listed below and the reasons are numerous.

4INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
 The new IT infrastructure would be helping a lot in increasing the Countdown
supermarkets ability to respond to the various kind of evolving marketplace by making
use of the speed as well as the flexibility in an efficient way.
 Would be helping a lot in collecting and analyzing the data of the customer, along with
enhancing the process of differentiation.
 Would be helping a lot in working in an effective way; supermarkets need one system
working across all the stores (or even across the national borders) for the purpose of
making sure of the fact that the stocks are used in most effective way so as to improve the
business processes.
The new IT strategy and problems faced by the strategy and Benefits:
The data warehouse and the technology can be considered to be an application of the
DSS or the Decision Support Systems which is considered as one of the latest trend. OLAP or
Online Analytical Processing decision making method are to be done according to the demand
in the process of multi-dimensional view of the different type of information to the data that are
stored in the warehouse for the purpose of providing the decision makers with a wide range of
business analysis (Avgerou & Walsham, 2017). “Data Warehouse Environment Supermarket
Invoicing System Architecture” is to be adopted. The “Traditional Invoicing System” is to be
built with the single database-centric data organization model, along with this the decision
analysis has also been not capable of meeting the system requirements which are present in the
database but with the usage of the data warehouse technology along with the development of the
problem which has been discussed above has been associated with providing a powerful tool and

5INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
means as well. Data Warehousing can be considered to be a kind of multiple distributed
heterogeneous database which has been associated with providing a unified query technology.
the data warehouse management system of enterprise from outside the original data and this is
followed by collating the data together into a data warehouse and depending on this by making
use of smooth, rational and comprehensive information management in order to make the end
user capable of extracting the data directly from the data warehouse which is associated with
analysis of the data (Lloyd, 2017).
Data warehouse is not considered to be a substitute of the traditional database but on the
basis of the traditional database the re-organization of the data which is used for the purpose of
supporting the decision analysis. The Data Warehouse and the traditional database system is
associated with assuming various kind of tasks which plays different kind of roles (Hilton et al.,
2013). By adopting this process the transaction processing environment and the analytic
processing environment for the purpose of achieving the separation along with the relative
independence, which is generally consisting of the entire new system environment. The data
warehouse can be considered to be a system of core-based environment. The environment of
Data Warehouse, at the countdown supermarkets invoicing system would be composing of
business processing subsystems along with support decision-making subsystem and the data
management subsystem which generally has three parts. The business processing subsystem
where the background for the traditional database foreground can be considered to be a business
application system along with the completion of the entire invoicing business day processing
along with the full invoicing system data entry and also to provide assistance to the decision
making subsystems is associated with providing the raw data which includes the support decision
making system and many more (Wang, Harris & Patterson, 2012). Along with this the

6INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
completion of the statistical analysis and the forecasting capabilities would be associated with
achieving decision making support. Along with this the data management subsystem would be
responsible of the data management of the entire system or in particular the data from different
data sources in order to transfer the data warehouse and the structure of the data warehouse and
the business rules management.
The new proposed system has advantages as well as disadvantages. Some of the
advantages includes the easy carrying out of the market analysis, trend analysis along with this
the subgroups of commodities, layout, purchase of the analysis recommendation and
merchandise. Carrying out of the analysis of the effectiveness of the promotional activities would
also become easy. The customer loyalty can also be analyzed in an easy way (Gil-Garcia, Helbig
& Ojo, 2014). Along with this there also exists some disadvantages like the higher initial capital
investment need of special training for the staffs along with difficulties during integration of this
system with the other management information system.
Despite of this there exists some benefits for the organization. The data warehouse and
the multi-dimensional analysis along with comprehensive data on capacity along with this it can
also be fast and accurate while analyzing the data in order to provide help to the managers for
making better decision so as to bring a competitive advantage for the countdown supermarket.
The data warehouse and the data mining technology that is being used by the supermarket
currently is not very extensive however being a commercial enterprise they are having complex
business structures ad so there are numerous Invoicing business data (Rao, Brümmer & Qaim,
2012). Due to all this reason there is a specific need for analyzing the decision along with the
data warehouse technology that is used in the business enterprise applications which is having a
broad prospect.

7INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Security:
The major security risks faced by the Countdown supermarket can be categorized into four
different categories and this includes the following:
Physical threat: This threats generally occurs due to physical access or damage of the IT
resources like the servers that are used by the countdown supermarket. This type of threats
includes the damage to the instruments due to fire or flood or any kind of unauthorized access to
the data which are confidential and are regarding an employee or a customer.
Electronic threats: This type of threats is generally aimed at making compromises regarding the
information of the business which might be including a hacker capable of getting access to the
website of the supermarket or to the IT system and they can become infected by a computer
virus. Besides this the threat also includes the supermarkets becoming a victim of a fraudulent
email or website. This type of threat are commonly of a criminal nature (Rainer et al., 2013).
Technical failure: This mainly includes the software bugs, complete failure of a computer
component or a computer crash. This type of failures can be considered to be catastrophic for
example in case if the hard drive of any of the computer used by the Countdown supermarket
crashes then it is totally not possible to retrieve the data from that damaged hard drive and along
there also does not exists any kind of backup copy as well (Li et al., 2012).
Infrastructure failure: This type of threat might include the loss of internet connectivity which
would be having a major impact on the daily business conducted by the supermarket for example
loss of important purchase order.

8INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Human error: This can be considered to be one of the major security risk for example when
someone accidentally deletes a data which is important or there might occur also situation when
an individual fails to follow the security procedures properly (Beynon-Davies, 2013).
All this security threats can be mitigated by two main type of risk assessments and this includes
the following:
Quantitative risk assessment: This type of assessment is associated with combining the
probability of the risks that are occurring and the costs related to the impact and recovery. In
cases when the supermarket assesses a risk which is having a high probability of happening
along with the potential of high cost/impact to the business then it the responsibility of the
supermarket to deem it as high risk (Volkow, 2017). Besides this the low risk category includes
the risks which are unlikely to happen or will cost very little. This type of quantitative mesures
works whenever there is the presence of a good set of data. The supermarket always might not be
having the data that is needed to work out with the probability or with the cost estimations
related to the IT risks as they are changing at a very quick rate.
Qualitative risk assessment: This type of approach is considered to be much more practical and
generally relies upon the use of judgements for the purpose of deciding whether the probability
of occurrence of risk is high, medium or low. The supermarket might be using this approach for
the purpose of classifying as high probability something that they can expect to be happening
several times a year (Zhu, Mukhopadhyay & Kurata, 2012). The same thing is to be done for the
cost or impact in whatever terms seem useful. Followed by this the supermarket might be
associated with taking decisions so as to rank the risks according to the significance that they are
having to the business of the supermarket. Once establishment of what the risks are and what is

9INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
the importance that they are having to the business then the supermarket would become capable
of deciding whether the risks are to be accepted or are they to be managed.
IT Measurements:
Countdown supermarket has started to notice that role that is played by the technology which
acts as one of the major enabler. In an essential way the information technology would also be
speeding up the processes as well as the delivery of cost saving benefits to the company.
The supermarket Countdown has been associated with facing many specific challenges
which are related to the management of the IT and this includes the following:
 Customer data
Unlike many of the supermarkets the Countdown supermarket has also been struggling a lot with
the information overload and this is due to the reason that they required to collect the data and to
sift through mass amounts of data, which would followed by the converting of the data into
useful information for the customer-centric industry and Countdown supermarket is a customer-
centric organization (Winter, 2014).
 Transparency and tracking
Countdown supermarket has been associated with increasing the transparency between the
systems, along with obtaining a better tracking for the purpose of integrating the systems from
manufacturer to the consumer by obtaining the information about the customer and sales related
information (Kalnikaitė, Bird & Rogers, 2013).
 Global data synchronization

10INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
The presence of radio frequency identification/electronic product coding in the Countdown
supermarket has mad the entire supply chain become more intelligent. The supermarket is
associated with the usage of real-time data for the purpose of watching the levels of inventory.
Along with this the radio frequency identification tagging or the RFID tagging helped a lot in
positioning the company capable of safeguarding its shipments which is generally done by
allowing products to be tracked from manufacturer through the entire supply chain. RFID can be
considered to be a barcode that is associated with emitting a radio frequency. By making use of
the computer monitoring system the supermarket Countdown is associated with tracking the
products when the product leaves the shelves and whenever they check out (Yin, Pei &
Ranchhod, 2013). This is associated with helping the supermarket to analyze the products that
are bought by the customers along with having a better track of the inventory whenever it moves
throughout the store.
 PCI Security Compliance
PCI Security Compliance is also used by the Countdown Supermarket which is associated with
addressing the supermarkets internal security setup along with the practices, for the purpose of
mitigating the security risks related to the various kind of payments. In case when a retailer is
associated with collection or storage of the credit card information which when compromised
might lead to losing of the capability of accepting credit card payments (Bhaskaran, 2013). There
also exists other type of possibilities and this mainly includes the lawsuits, insurance claims,
cancelled accounts, and government fines.
The retailers who are associated with taking advantage of outsourcing IT would be responsible
for obtaining the optimal advice along with the benefits from outsourcing. It has been seen that

11INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
numerous retailers have been associated with turning towards the IT outsourcing which generally
acts as a way of controlling the costs and improving the delivery of services.
Inventory computer systems are used by the supermarket which is used for automatic
tracking of all the inventory that is possessed by the supermarket. All these computers are used
as the part of the checkout process which is associated with holding of information like the
amount of supplies present in the shelves, what kind of suppliers are available in the warehouse
and what are the requirements of the supermarket (Dubey & Jalal, 2013). This advanced systems
are associated with predicting the storage along with ordering of the new inventory whenever it
is necessary. The simple systems present inside the supermarket helps the users in checking the
sales for accuracy and also to monitor the inventory by themselves.
The computer system helps the supermarkets in analyzing the data related to sales so as
to help the managers in making a better plan related to marketing. The computers are associated
with the usage of the inventory systems for the purpose of gathering data related to the product
that are being sold, analysis of the data so as to figure out the trends of certain products. Thin in
turn is associated with allowing the marketing department to make an educated guess regarding
the products what are being sold and thereby organizing the supermarkets so as to make the
finding of this products easier (Costa et al., 2013). This in turn are connected to the promotions
of the product.
Countdown is associated with dealing of various food groups which needs particular type of
temperature control. Countdown is associated with the usage of computers for the purpose of
monitoring the temperatures and conditions inside the supermarket and makes adjustment
whenever necessary.

12INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
CIO and Staff:
The CIO or the chief executive officers are responsible for the setting of the goals and the
objectives that the company is having. Their responsibility basically involves the development of
the supermarket profitability goals of the supermarket, the management of the capital allocation
and the development of the supermarket image and the design of the supermarkets operating
strategies. Profits or particularly the returns on the investments are considered to be most
common financial performance measures that are to be used by the supermarket
(countdown.co.nz, 2018). The capital allocation decision are related to the real estates and the
purchase of the equipment’s and the sales as well. For the purpose of cultivating the firm image,
the standards are to be set for the customer services, the quality of the product, mixture of the
product, the methods related to display, advertising and the appearance of the employees as well.
The operational strategies of the supermarket mainly involves the various pricing methods, the
objectives of the sales and the budgets related to advertising. There also exists the store
managers, department managers, EMID and the scanning coordinators, Merchandisers and many
more. Each of them are assigned with a specific role.
Conclusion:
The discussion conducted above helps in concluding to the fact that the supermarket Countdown
has earned a lot of benefits due to the usage of the IT. The report has also been discussing about
the entire supermarket along with primary commercial activities. The main business processes
has also been discussed in this report. The current Information Technology and the system of the
Countdown supermarket has also been discussed. The IT vision for this organization has also
been discussed. Along with this various kind of security risks has also been discussed in this
report along with the way by which the risks can be mitigated.

13INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

14INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
References:
Avgerou, C., & Walsham, G. (Eds.). (2017). Information Technology in Context: Studies from
the Perspective of Developing Countries: Studies from the Perspective of Developing Countries.
Routledge.
Beynon-Davies, P. (2013). Business information systems. Palgrave Macmillan.
Bhaskaran, S. (2013). Structured case studies: Information communication technology adoption
by small-to-medium food enterprises. British Food Journal, 115(3), 425-447.
Costa, C., Antonucci, F., Pallottino, F., Aguzzi, J., Sarriá, D., & Menesatti, P. (2013). A review
on agri-food supply chain traceability by means of RFID technology. Food and Bioprocess
Technology, 6(2), 353-366.
countdown.co.nz. (2018). Countdown Supermarkets - New Zealand’s leading supermarket brand.
Retrieved from https://www.countdown.co.nz/
Dubey, S. R., & Jalal, A. S. (2013). Species and variety detection of fruits and vegetables from
images. International Journal of Applied Pattern Recognition, 1(1), 108-126.
Gil-Garcia, J. R., Helbig, N., & Ojo, A. (2014). Being smart: Emerging technologies and
innovation in the public sector. Government Information Quarterly, 31, I1-I8.
Hilton, T., Hughes, T., Little, E., & Marandi, E. (2013). Adopting self-service technology to do
more with less. Journal of Services Marketing, 27(1), 3-12.
Kalnikaitė, V., Bird, J., & Rogers, Y. (2013). Decision-making in the aisles: informing,
overwhelming or nudging supermarket shoppers?. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 17(6),
1247-1259.

15INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Laudon, K. C., & Laudon, J. P. (2016). Management information system. Pearson Education
India.
Laudon, K. C., & Traver, C. G. (2013). E-commerce. Pearson.
Li, Y., Hou, M., Liu, H., & Liu, Y. (2012). Towards a theoretical framework of strategic
decision, supporting capability and information sharing under the context of Internet of Things.
Information Technology and Management, 13(4), 205-216.
Lloyd, I. (2017). Information technology law. Oxford University Press.
Rainer, R. K., Cegielski, C. G., Splettstoesser-Hogeterp, I., & Sanchez-Rodriguez, C. (2013).
Introduction to information systems. John Wiley & Sons.
Rao, E. J., Brümmer, B., & Qaim, M. (2012). Farmer participation in supermarket channels,
production technology, and efficiency: the case of vegetables in Kenya. American Journal of
Agricultural Economics, 94(4), 891-912.
Volkow, N. (2017). Strategic use of information technology requires knowing how to use
information. In Information Technology in Context: studies from the perspective of developing
countries (pp. 72-85). Routledge.
Wang, C., Harris, J., & Patterson, P. G. (2012). Customer choice of self-service technology: the
roles of situational influences and past experience. Journal of Service Management, 23(1), 54-78.
Winter, J. S. (2014). Surveillance in ubiquitous network societies: normative conflicts related to
the consumer in-store supermarket experience in the context of the Internet of Things. Ethics and
Information Technology, 16(1), 27-41.

16INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Yin, Y., Pei, E., & Ranchhod, A. (2013). The shopping experience of older supermarket
consumers. Journal of Enterprise Information Management, 26(4), 444-471.
Zhu, X., Mukhopadhyay, S. K., & Kurata, H. (2012). A review of RFID technology and its
managerial applications in different industries. Journal of Engineering and Technology
Management, 29(1), 152-167.