Blooming with Technology Case Study Analysis

This assignment requires a detailed analysis of the 'Blooming with Technology' case study. Students must examine the company's challenges, such as managing its vast data resources and ensuring data security, as well as explore the implemented solutions and their effectiveness. The analysis should include a critical evaluation of the technologies used and their impact on the company's operations and overall success.

Running head: IT FOR BUSINESS
IT for Business
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Executive Summary
The purpose of the report is to identify and analyse the effectiveness of a new Point of sales
system in business. The Point of sales system eliminates the need of manual record keeping
thereby enhancing the accuracy of the reports. The report cites an example of the Four Seasons
Greenhouse and Nursery that is largely benefited by the implementation of the new point of sales
system as it considerably helped the organization in proper estimation of the inventory and
tracking of sales. The POS completely revolutionized the operation of the organization thereby
providing it a competitive advantage in the marketplace. The report provides an overview of the
advantages, disadvantages and associated risks of the new POS.

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Table of Contents
Introduction..........................................................................................................................3
1. Advantages and Disadvantages of POS system...............................................................3
2. The Competitive advantage of the Business....................................................................5
3. Advantages of having a centralized database..................................................................6
4. The POS in facilitating decision-making.........................................................................7
5. Telecommunication options.............................................................................................8
6. Business Risks.................................................................................................................9
Conclusion...........................................................................................................................9
Recommendations..............................................................................................................10
References..........................................................................................................................11
Appendix............................................................................................................................13
Appendix 1.....................................................................................................................13
Appendix 2.....................................................................................................................14

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Introduction
The Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery of Colorado is a small business organization
that has been profited by the introduction of new point of sale system in the year 2008. The
system compiled all the essential business data for improving the decision making process of the
Nursery. The point of sale system allowed the owners to track the business data and sales
transaction in real time that helps in enhancing the estimation process (refer to appendix 1). This
system has considerably helped the organization in increasing the amount of profit as previously,
with the system of manual record keeping the amount of profit of the nursery was negligible. The
timely availability of the product information helps in proper maintenance of the inventory
(Laudon and Laudon 2016). The report gives an overview of the different advantages,
disadvantages and risks associated with the new point of sales system.
1. Advantages and Disadvantages of POS system
The advantages of the new point of sales system are as follows (refer to appendix 2)-
1. The new point of sale system eliminates the need of manual tracking of the sales by
allowing the owners to track the transactions immediately. Therefore, the new point of sales
system makes the tiresome process of compiling the sales history considerably simple.
Furthermore, it eliminates the possibility of error in updating the sales details manually (Stadtle
2015).
2. The new point of sales system increases the accuracy of the financial data of the
system. With the implementation of the system, the manual entry of the sales transactions is
eliminated as well. This reduced the number of errors in calculation of the financial data and
associated with the sales.

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3. The new Point of sales system furthermore helped in carrying out the vital tasks of
business such as estimation of inventory and sales in a relatively lesser time in comparison with
the manual data keeping system. This is because the details of the sales and the inventory are
updated in real time (Diallo, Rodrigues and Sene 2012).
4. The accurate and flawless data keeping by the point of sales system have considerably
helped the organization with their business decision-making process. The accurate inventory
count and negligible guesswork have furthermore helped the business in operating in a leaner
inventory unit.
5. A proper report of the detailed transaction of inventory items such as the number of
units purchased, sold or discarded is now possible to obtain with the help of the point of sales
system, which was earlier impossible due to the manual record keeping.
6. The new point of sales system has considerably helped the organization in
understanding and identifying the higher profitable products. The perspective of real cost have
considerably helped the organization in shifting the production to the higher profit items thereby
increasing the profit percentage.
7. The real time reporting has furthermore helped the managers in becoming more
effective with their business operation.
8. The new system has furthermore helped in controlling the employee schedule and
allocating labour expenses to the specific departments and functions, as it has been easier to track
the requirements with the help of the new point of sales system. This function helps the owners
in delegating more responsibility to the staffs for establishment of the accountability within Four
Seasons.

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However, with the numerous advantages, there are certain disadvantages as well. The
disadvantages of the new point of sales system are as follows-
1. Implementation of the point of sales system is a somewhat costly for small and
medium sized enterprises. This is because in order to implement the system within the
organization, various hardware and software configuration changes are needed in the
organization. This indicates investment of a huge amount of money for the system.
2. It is very essential to impart training to the staffs of the organization in order to make
them understand the operation of the new point of sales system. Incorrect operation of the system
might lead in generation of the erroneous data or incorrect results.
3. The system needs a regular maintenance. The organization will have to invest a certain
some of money for the maintenance of the system.
However, if the system is successfully implemented within the organization, it will help
the organization in gaining competitive advantage in the marketplace, thereby increasing the
profit percentage as well. The disadvantages of the system are negligible in comparison to the
advantages it offers to the organization.
2. The Competitive advantage of the Business
The implementation of the new point of system is expected to offer various competitive
advantages to the business organization in the market place. The competitive advantage that the
business gain by implementation of the new point of sales system are as follows-

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1. The point of sales system integrates all the business operation in a single place. This
helps in clear view of the business operations thereby helping in proper management of the
business. This in turn helps in gaining a competitive advantage in the market place.
2. The elimination of the manual record keeping of the financial transactions helps
achieving a correct data set that in turn helps in improving the business operations of the
organization. This certainly provides a competitive advantage to the organization in the market
place.
3. Since the new point of sales system helps in tracking the most profitable product and
proper management of the inventory, it helps in producing the more profitable product thus
giving the organization a competitive advantage in the marketplace (Romney and Steinbart
2012).
4. The major competitive advantage of the company in implementing the new point of
sales system is that apart from helping the organization in proper management of the inventory
goods, it also helps in proper management of the labours and the employees of the organization
(Peppard and Ward 2016).
Therefore, it can certainly be said that the new point of sales system will help the Four
Season in gaining Competitive advantage in the market.
3. Advantages of having a centralized database
The advantages of having a centralized database are as follows-

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1. A centralize database considerably improves the data preservation as all the important
information regarding the sales and other financial data are stored in a single place (Coronel and
Morris 2016).
2. A centralized database improves the data security as storage of data in a central
storage limits the security risks the data can face.
3. Centralized database further helps in reducing the cost of the cost of storage, increases
the speed of data process. Furthermore, it offers a proper disaster recovery technique and
decreases the risk of data manipulation (Stair and Reynolds 2013).
4. It is a cost saving solution and increases the operational efficiency of the organization.
4. The POS in facilitating decision-making
The new point of sales system integrates the different operations of the organization thus
facilitating the decision making process. The point of sales systems processes the business
activities more effectively by providing an accurate data of inventory and sales. For example, in
Four Seasons, the products were ordered merely on basis of speculations and there were no
proper inventory data. However, with the implementation of the POS system, the units of the
products are no longer ordered based on speculations, thus helping the business in operating on a
leaner inventory units (Hall 2012).
The manual information tracking is difficult to conduct in an effective manner, as it is not
only time consuming but also prone to human errors. Therefore, it becomes very difficult to track
the information in an effective manner (Galliers and Leidner 2014). Thus, the implementation of
the new POS enhances the decision making process.

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With the implementation of the new POS system, it has been easier to track the inventory
and the sales. It is easier to answer the questions related to the amount of purchased orders,
orders sold, and orders discarded. Furthermore it increase the control over the employees of the
organization as well, thereby facilitating the decision making process (Pearlson et al. 2016).
The accurate information provided by the new POS system will help in effective
management of all the processes running within an organization. Proper knowledge about the
detailed product costs helps in managing and producing products that are more profitable.
Furthermore, the detailed management information offers control over schedules and labour
expenses as well thereby enhancing the process of decision-making.
5. Telecommunication options
There are different types of network options for the implementation of POS in Four
Seasons, such as LAN, WAN and MAN. LAN or local area network shares a common wireless
communication link to the server within a distinct geographical location. WAN or Wide Area
Network on the other hand interconnects a multiple LAN connection in a distributed
geographical location. Metropolitan Area Network or MAN interconnects the users with the
computer resources in a specific geographical area or region.
It is beneficial for the organization to implement the new POS system in WAN (Zhang et
al. 2012). This will help the employees of the organization in easier access and management of
the data. Furthermore, WAN centralizes the IT infrastructure thereby helping in centralized data
management (Barakah and Ammad-uddin 2012).
A wired network connection although increases the security of the network, it is a very
costly process. Furthermore, it becomes very difficult to manage a wired connection in a wide

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area network. Therefore, it is recommended for the Four Seasons to establish a wireless network
connection for the new POS system.
6. Business Risks
The new POS system although offers various advantages to the organization, it is
exposed to a number of risks as well (Zissis and Lekkas 2012). The implementation of the
system in a wireless network increases the security risk. This is because a wireless network is
very vulnerable to attacks and can lead to data loss or data theft. This security risk can be
avoided by installing a proper intrusion detection system in the network.
The storage of company’s data in a centralized database might invite a privacy risk as the
database can be compromised due to various virus and malware attacks. This can be prevented
by proper data encryption and protection of the system by an up to date antivirus (Al Ameen, Liu
and Kwak 2012).
Tracking the sales and financial data with the help of the new POS might invite breach of
the confidentiality of the customers’ data due to data compromise by the hackers of loss of data
due to malware or security attack. This can be prevented by storing of data in encrypted form and
enforcing authorization levels for data access.
Conclusion
Therefore, it can be deduced that, implementation of the new POS system will
considerably help the Four Seasons in obtaining competitive advantages in the marketplace. The
report discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the POS system proposed along with the

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business risk and organization might face while implementing the system. The report further
suggests the different risk mitigation process for the identified business risks.
Recommendations
1. A proper plan is to be made for implementation of POS and should be implemented
according to the needs
2. In order to increase the security and privacy of the data, proper intrusion detection
system is to be installed.
3. It is recommended for the organization to allocate proper time and money for the
system maintenance.

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References
Al Ameen, M., Liu, J. and Kwak, K., 2012. Security and privacy issues in wireless sensor
networks for healthcare applications. Journal of medical systems, 36(1), pp.93-101.
Barakah, D.M. and Ammad-uddin, M., 2012, February. A survey of challenges and applications
of wireless body area network (WBAN) and role of a virtual doctor server in existing
architecture. In Intelligent Systems, Modelling and Simulation (ISMS), 2012 Third International
Conference on (pp. 214-219). IEEE.
Coronel, C. and Morris, S., 2016. Database systems: design, implementation, & management.
Cengage Learning.
Diallo, O., Rodrigues, J.J. and Sene, M., 2012. Real-time data management on wireless sensor
networks: A survey. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 35(3), pp.1013-1021.
Galliers, R.D. and Leidner, D.E. eds., 2014. Strategic information management: challenges and
strategies in managing information systems. Routledge.
Hall, J.A., 2012. Accounting information systems. Cengage Learning.
Laudon, K.C. and Laudon, J.P., 2016. Management information system. Pearson Education
India.
Pearlson, K.E., Saunders, C.S. and Galletta, D.F., 2016. Managing and Using Information
Systems, Binder Ready Version: A Strategic Approach. John Wiley & Sons.
Peppard, J. and Ward, J., 2016. The strategic management of information systems: Building a
digital strategy. John Wiley & Sons.

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Romney, M.B. and Steinbart, P.J., 2012. Accounting information systems. Boston: Pearson.
Stadtler, H., 2015. Supply chain management: An overview. In Supply chain management and
advanced planning (pp. 3-28). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Stair, R. and Reynolds, G., 2013. Principles of information systems. Cengage Learning.
Zhang, Y., Ansari, N., Wu, M. and Yu, H., 2012. On wide area network optimization. IEEE
Communications surveys & tutorials, 14(4), pp.1090-1113.
Zissis, D. and Lekkas, D., 2012. Addressing cloud computing security issues. Future Generation
computer systems, 28(3), pp.583-592.

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Appendix
Appendix 1
What is POS?
POS refers to the time and place or the point in which a sales transaction is completed. It helps in
effective management of the financial data of a company thereby enhancing the business and
decision-making process within the organization.
The best POS systems are affordable and easy to use, and do more than just process sales and
accept payments, as they include time-saving features that help in analysing the sales data and
manage the inventory, staff and customers. The best systems also include or have integrations for
email marketing, loyalty programs, and other capabilities that make it easier to run and grow the
business. The best vendors also provide reliable customer support.

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Appendix 2
Blooming with Technology Case Study

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