Foundations Of Information Systems Report 2022

Running head: FOUNDATIONS OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS
FOUNDATIONS OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Background Issues.....................................................................................................................2
Literature Review of the Issues..................................................................................................3
Recommendation to the Company.............................................................................................5
Enterprise Resource Planning................................................................................................5
Netsuite ERP..........................................................................................................................8
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................9
Appendices...............................................................................................................................10
References................................................................................................................................11

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Introduction
The information systems are the integration of information technology people and
procedures of business in order to achieve an objective of business. Each information system
has information technology, people and procedures. The five components of information
systems include computer hardware, computer software, telecommunications, databases and
human procedures and resources.
The report discusses about the company of Fibre Fashion and the operations of the
company. The report discusses about the issues those are faced by the company and the
background of the issues of the company. The company provides a literature review of the
issues those are faced by the Fibre Fashion technology. The report provides appropriate
recommendations of the company about the information systems that can be implemented to
the company in order to resolve the issues of the company.
Background Issues
Fibre Fashion has been in the presence in the fashion industry of Melbourne for 200
years. The Company has 110 shops all over the continent of Australia. The primary activities
of the company include operation, inbound logistics, outbound logistics, marketing, sales and
services to the people of Australia. The Company has a website from where the customers of
Fibre Fashion can order clothes (Baumann-Pauly & Jastram, 2018). However, the Fibre
Fashion a lot is problems in its operations due to its lack of good decisions. The result of
these problems is that the sales of the company are decreasing, they are losing their potential
customers and the revenue of the company is reducing day by day. The main issue of the
company is that they utilise spreadsheets for their operations. The spreadsheets are used for
keep note of the new customers, sales of the company, number of orders, inventory, profits
and many more. There are lot of issues of spreadsheets (Štefko & Steffek, 2018). The

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spreadsheets had to filled up manually by the employees of the company and during the hours
of rush, there can be errors filling the spreadsheets. The company have to take the
spreadsheets of all the stores and have to compile them in order to calculate the number of
potential customers, number of new customers, revenue, number of orders and many more.
Therefore, it is a very tedious job to compile the spreadsheets of 110 stores and errors are
inevitable (Świeboda, 2016). It is very complex to generate reports from the spreadsheets.
Therefore, the managers cannot produce reports from the spreadsheets. Due to this, the
managers cannot take efficient decisions regarding the marketing of the company, products
and services of the company. The result of this is that the company has very low new
customers, they are losing their potential new customers due to effective marketing strategies,
and revenues of the companies are reducing. The company cannot provide excellent services
to the customers and the sales of the company are decreasing (Balakrishnan et al.,2017). The
company have to solve the issue of spreadsheets in order to solve the issues of marketing and
sales. The research question recognised is “How can the issue of spreadsheet solve”?
Literature Review of the Issues
Various companies utilise spreadsheets in order to carry out its operations such as
inventory, new customers, sales count of the company, revenue of the company and other
operations of the company. The Fibre Fashion Company also utilises spreadsheets in order to
carry out its operations (van der Aalst, 2018). However, issues have occurred in the company
due to the use of spreadsheets such as lowering of sales, effective marketing strategies, lower
profits and many more. Therefore, the spreadsheets are ineffective for the company. The bad
aspects of the spreadsheets that can affect include the following:
Vulnerable to fraud: Of all the disadvantages of spreadsheets, this disadvantage is most
dangerous and damaging. The major reason behind the vulnerability of spreadsheets is the

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lack of controls in spreadsheets and that makes it easy to modify formulas, values, and
dependencies without being detected (Saldivar et al.,2016).
Human errors: while fraud will always be a risk to the systems of spreadsheets, a more
important threat of the spreadsheet is human errors (Motale, 2019). Missed negative signs
and misalignment of rows can sound harmless but it can lead to severe consequences like
damaging the confidence of the investors and loss of millions of dollars.
Difficult to troubleshoot: It is very difficult to troubleshoot in the spreadsheets. The
spreadsheets have interrelated data that is scattered across various folders, offices,
workstations and geographical locations. It is very difficult to trace the logic of the formulas
from one cell to another that is related.
Not designed for collaborative work: The activities of collaboration include planning,
budgeting, forecasting and reporting. It needs various informations from individuals in order
to perform operations. The methods of the exchange are vulnerable to duplicate and data that
is erroneous (Manan, 2017). The members of the team will find it tough to track the files
those are similar and they can end up sending the wrong file.
Hard to consolidate: The end users favour spreadsheets to entry the data and analysis of the
task. The data in the systems those are based on spreadsheets are distributed throughout the
company. However, when the generation of reports comes, it becomes a very consolidation
procedure (Csernoch & Biró, 2017). Throughout the whole procedure of consolidation, the
data in the spreadsheets are subjected to large activities those are prone to errors such as
copy-paste, entries in then cells and the specification of range.
Decision-making: in the environments those are based on spreadsheets, the extraction of data
from various departments, consolidating them and then summarizing the information and
then make appropriate decisions for the decisions is very time consuming. The spreadsheets

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are vulnerable to errors and the people those are involved in the processing of information
have to be careful in order to keep the data integrity intact (Adhi & Prasetya, 2019). This can
procedure can delay the procedure. Therefore, when the information reaches the managers to
take the decision, there are very less time left.
Very poor scaling: As the company grows, the system based on spreadsheets get more
distributed and therefore, the issues those are mentioned above increases. Therefore, it is
recommended to large organizations not to utilise spreadsheets for its operations.
Recommendation to the Company
The issues of spreadsheets have adversely affected the company such that the
company is losing its customers, no new strategy of marketing and profits are decreasing. In
order to resolve these issues, several things can be recommended to the Fibre Fashion
Company. The recommendations include an Enterprise Resource Planning system that can be
implemented in the company in order to solve the issues. The ERP system will help the
company to resolve the issues of spreadsheets, making efficient marketing strategies and
providing proper customers services and it will result in the increase in profits of the
company.
Enterprise Resource Planning
Enterprise Resource Planning is a procedure that is utilised by various companies in
order to administer and integrate the essential parts of the business of the company. There are
various software applications of ERP those are essential to organizations. They assist the
companies to deploy resource planning by combining all the procedures needed to run the
company (Chofreh, Goni & Klemeš, 2018). A system of ERP can combine planning, sales,
marketing, human resources, finance and many more. The applications of ERP permit various
departments of the company and in this case, the various stores of the Fibre fashion Company

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to communicate and share information with the rest of the organization. It collects various
informations and makes this information to other parts of the company where it can be
utilised productively (Alomari et al.,2018).
The Module of ERP that can be used by the Fibre fashion Company is marketing and
sales module of the company. The marketing and sales modules of ERP will help the
company to stay competitive and then streamline the activities of marketing and sales
(Siswanto & Maulida, 2016). The module of sales and marketing offers features that start
from contacting the customers those are referred to as activities of pre-sales. It permits
tracking of every order to customers from placing an order to dispatch of materials from that
specific order, raising the invoices of sales and receiving the payments from various
customers (Haddara & Constantini, 2017). The core features of module of ERP sales and
marketing includes:
 Order to sales
 Scheduling of order
 Shipping with a note of delivery
 Tracking the invoices of sales
 Returns of sales
The advantages of modules of sales and marketing in ERP include (Vijaivargia & Garg,
2019):
 It automates the activities of sales force such as customers visits and tracking the
expenses of the customers
 Setting of market for the personnel of marketing
 Recording of payments those are received from various customers after the order is
dispatched. The module of sales and marketing in ERP permits the executives of

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marketing to contact the potential customers, follow up of the invoices of sales and
receive the payments from the various invoices
 Track the order those are lost and recognise the reasons for losing the orders
 Permits to prepare reports of activities of marketing and sales of the organization such as
tracks the trends of sales and permit forecast of sales.
The other features of the ERP system that will resolve the issues of the spreadsheets
include the following:
Automation: This ability of ERP automates the tedious jobs such as entry of order, payroll,
invoicing, accounting and many more. Automation saves the time the time of the employees
and permits the employees to focus on essential equipments (Venkatraman & Fahd, 2016).
Automating the procedures also minimizes human errors. Automation permits data to be sent
from part of the system to other without any error.
Analysis of data: ERP system collects the data of the various stores of the company and
capitalizes the information for the analysis of data. This function of ERP recognises patterns
and trends in the procedures of the company. This will enable the company to reflect on
effectiveness of various tasks and it provides forecasts for decisions of business. ERP
evaluates the data associating to all the operations of business consisting of data of clients,
statistics of production, data of sales and much more (Jimei et al.,2018). The analysis of data
provides access to important data of business and provides tools and techniques in order to
track the productivity and efficiency of the organization.
Reporting: The reporting ability of ERP is tool that will help to convey the analysis to the
managers of the company. These tools and techniques consist of dashboards those are
customizable, pie charts, gnat charts, bar graphs and other representation. Many systems
allow the users to limit access to reports thereby, safeguarding important information of the

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company. ERP offers reports those are detailed, relevant and actionable. The reporting
abilities of ERP assist the company to target its weaknesses making sure stronger
performance over time (Arab Momeni, Yaghoubi & Ebrahimi Arjestan, 2018).
Therefore, these are the features of the ERP that will help the company to replace the
spreadsheets and resolve the issues that the company used to face with the utilisation of
spreadsheets.
Netsuite ERP
The Netsuite ERP is a scalable cloud solution of ERP and it can be utilised by large
and mid-sized companies. This ERP automates the back and the front office procedures
consisting of financial and revenue management, fixed resources, management of order,
billing and many more (Data, 2020). It is recommended to the Fibre fashion company to
implement this ERP as it automates the back and the front office and company no longer have
to use the spreadsheets. It will also resolve the issues faced by the company due to the use of
spreadsheets. This ERP has a built-in business intelligence that can help the company to
make decisions those are data driven and well informed. The platform helps to accelerate
procedures of order-to-cash with a well-connected suite of management. A unique advantage
of the Netsuite ERP is administration of the warehouse and it can be used in order to manage
the inventory, and the data will updated at regular intervals (Snellman, 2017). This ERP is a
Platform that is based on cloud and it is software as a service. The software provides a suite
of development of application and tools of configuration that will provide the company some
flexibility in order to support requirements of growing business.
The Netsuite has large benefits from which the Fibre Fashion Company will be
benefitted. The benefits of the ERP are as follows (Rolling, 2016):

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 Customers, invoices, orders, and information of shipping are centralized in order to help
minimize the errors of fulfilment and avoid costs of reconciling the information of
shipping. This module combines with top carriers of shipping in order to help the
company to administer the needs of shipping such as upgraded rates of shipping and
processing costs of orders
 The Netsuite ERP comes with features of business intelligence those are built-in and then
associate them to the production and the financial management data for greater accuracy.
The company can turn the data into visual analytics those are off high quality and
administer the health of the business. The ERP can help to generate various reports and
insight and develop outlines of data.
 The Netsuite ERP complies with the standards of accounting and produce reports. The
management of revenue recognition permits the company to calculate and develop
accurate statement of finances for the products as well as services sales transactions.
 It provides a complete set of management of inventory and features of purchasing. The
other features include abilities of self-service for partners and upgraded collaboration
between the customers and the vendors through the supply chain.
Conclusion
From the report, it can be inferred that the Fibre Fashion Company is in great trouble
and they need to resolve the issues as soon as possible in order to increase the number of
customers and their profits. The report focuses on the background issue of the company that
have led to losing its customers. The issue that is found out is the inefficiency of the
spreadsheets. The Fibre Fashion Company utilises spreadsheets in order to keep track of the
operations of the company but spreadsheets are inefficient. The report discusses about the
literature review of the issues. The literature review states that the spreadsheets have various
advantages and it should not be used the companies as it has various disadvantages. The

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disadvantages include fraud, errors, collaboration, scalability and many more. The report
provides a recommendation to the company in form of an information system that can be
implemented in the company. The information system that can be implemented in the
company is an ERP system. The ERP will solve then issues of marketing and sales with the
help of the sales and marketing. It is properly discussed in the report, the way it can help the
company. The features of ERP can resolve the issues of spreadsheet such as automation, data
analysis and reporting. The specific ERP that can be implemented by the company is Netsuite
ERP. It is a cloud a cloud based platform that will help the company to streamline the
procedures and mitigate all the problems that the company is facing. It will help the company
to provide excellent services to the customers and increase its revenue.
Appendices
Scrum Meeting Minutes for the Project
Week Activity
1st week (1-5 days) Researched about the various issues that is
faced by the Fibre Fashion Company.
2nd week (8-12 days) Researching about the various information
systems that can be recommended to the
company to resolve the issues.

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References
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industry: challenges for investors. In Research Handbook on Human Rights and Investment.
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Balakrishnan, N. R., Render, B., Stair, R., & Munson, C. (2017). Managerial Decision
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