POS System: Advantages, Disadvantages, and Recommendations

This report discusses the advantages and disadvantages of POS systems, with a focus on a case study of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery. It also provides recommendations for telecommunication options and mitigation plans for probable risks.

Running head: POS SYSTEM
POS system
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s Note:

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Executive Summary
The main objective of this report is to understand the case study of Four Seasons Greenhouse
and Nursery. It is a small nursery located in Colorado for managing or tracking all types of
inventories manually. The organization has faced significant losses within the business and
hence, the management has decided to incorporate POS system or point of sale system in the
organization. This report has properly enhanced the proper implementation of the POS
system within the business and provided significant information regarding various benefits
and disadvantages of POS system. WAN technology is the most effective and suitable for this
organization.

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Discussion..................................................................................................................................3
1. Advantages and Disadvantages of New POS System........................................................3
2. How can POS System help in gaining competitive advantages.........................................4
3. Benefits of a centralized database......................................................................................5
4. POS System Facilitating Decision Making........................................................................6
5. Recommendations of Telecommunication Options...........................................................6
6. Probable Risks in POS System with Mitigation Plans.......................................................7
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................8
References..................................................................................................................................9
Bibliography.............................................................................................................................11
Appendices...............................................................................................................................12
Appendix 1...........................................................................................................................12
Appendix 2...........................................................................................................................12

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Introduction
POS or point of sale system is the particular time as well as place, where any retail
transaction is being completed. Point of sale is that point of time, when a specific merchant
evaluates the particular amount, which is being owned by the customer and thus indicating
the exact amount (Frisby et al. 2012). Next, the invoice is eventually prepared for the
customers and the customers then can proceed towards payment section. When he has made
the payment successfully, he gets the product from the seller. Point of sale is present in every
retail transaction, irrespective of the size of the organization.
The following report will be outlining a brief description on the significant case study
of a specific organization, namely, Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery. This report will be
demonstrating regarding the basic system of POS or point of sale in the particular
organization. There are various benefits and disadvantages of the system and all of them will
be mentioned here. Several recommendations will be provided here.
Discussion
1. Advantages and Disadvantages of New POS System
Point of sale system comprises of several important and significant advantages and
disadvantages. The organization of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery will be having
various advantages form the new point of sale system (Chavali, Yang & Nehorai, 2014). The
most significant advantages of the new POS system are as follows:
i) Efficiency and Rapidity: The first advantage of POS system is efficiency and
rapidity. The typical system of point of sale is utilized for improving the overall efficiency of

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the transactions that are taking place within the business. Furthermore, the transactions will
be extremely faster with this particular system.
ii) Managing Inventory: The second advantage of this system is that it helps to
manage the inventory properly. The organization of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery
was facing major problems while managing the inventories manually (Polasik et al., 2012).
Thus, POS system is the most effective option in this purpose.
iii) Accurate Financial Transactions: The third important advantage of the point of
sale system is that it helps to provide accurate financial transactions. There is almost no error
in the transactions and thus the transactions are accurate.
However, in spite of having these significant advantages, there are some of the major
disadvantages of this point of sale system. The major disadvantages are as follows:
i) Costly: The most important and significant disadvantage of this point of sale system
is that the initial implementation cost is very high and thus various organizations could not
afford them (Nikolova & Inman, 2015). There is no way to reduce this cost and thus it
becomes unaffordable for all. The organization of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery is
an extremely smaller nursery and hence this organization might be suffering from major
financial crisis when they would implement this system.
ii) Regular Maintenance: Another significant disadvantage of the point of sale
system is that it requires regular maintenance. It can thus become a major issue for the
organization of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery since the complete system of the
business operations as well as transactions would be stopped.

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2. How can POS System help in gaining competitive advantages
POS system or point of sale system eventually makes the entire transaction system
absolutely simple in respect to other systems (Cui et al., 2016). Thus, this system could
simply identify every detail related to the business operation from the transactions that are
occurring. For the simple transaction process, the work pressure of all the staffs and
employees are reduced. In the earlier days, these employees had to manage as well as track
each and everything manually. Now, with the incorporation of point of sale or POS system,
all the transactions and operations are done automatically. Furthermore, the point of sale
system has the core advantage of acknowledgement of all the products, which are
advantageous for the organization of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery. Thus, they
would enjoy huge profit. The process of decision making will also be easier with POS system
and thus cost effectiveness will be provided (Profeta, Balling & Roosen, 2012). The system
of point of sale would also bring out more revenue within the business and hence this
organization could have huge profit for completing all the business activities efficiently and
effectively.
3. Benefits of a centralized database
The centralized database could either be a simple database system or centralized
computer. Within a specific company, the centralized database is eventually used to access
information or data. All the users could usually access a centralized database by any
particular computer network (Gomzin, 2014). All of these kinds of centralized databases are
perfect for the smaller and medium sized companies, since they have limited amount of data.
The several advantages of the centralized database are given below:
i) Helps to Recover Data Preservation: The first advantage of a centralized database
is that it helps in recovering data preservation. It could also be improved as well as enhanced

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with this database. This type of database comprise of a setup for fault tolerance for helping in
the preservation of any confidential data. This can also occur if the hardware has failed.
ii) Improving Data Physical Security: The second advantage of the centralized
database is that it helps to improve the physical security of data (Rese, Schreiber & Baier,
2014). The physical access to the confidential data is thus restricted properly.
iii) Providing Data Security: The third important advantage of this centralized
database is that it helps to provide data security. The confidential information or data is
secured with this database.
iv) Cost Effectiveness: Another important benefit of the centralized database is the
cost effectiveness. It is extremely cost effective and thus could be afforded by all.
4. POS System Facilitating Decision Making
The process of decision making is much easier with the point of sale system or POS
system. In the earlier days, the organization of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery had to
order all the items by means of assuming all the requirements and then maintaining the track
of everything manually. However, with the incorporation of the system of POS within the
business, the entire procedure would be changed (Ko et al., 2012). The business process
would get absolutely efficient as well as fast for undertaking all the critical decisions with
this system. Several questions like what are to be brought or sold and how all the procedures
to be executed are answered with point of sale system. Furthermore, all this information that
is to be obtained from the above mentioned questions are absolutely advantageous to properly
manage the entire organization of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery. Hence, the process
of decision making is extremely easier with this system.

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5. Recommendations of Telecommunication Options
The organization of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery should strictly select the
wide area network or WAN. This particular network is responsible for providing network in
wide network. It is different from the local area network or LAN and metropolitan area
network or MAN. LAN is responsible for providing network to local area or smaller areas.
However, MAN or metropolitan area network is responsible for providing network to areas
larger than LAN. Thus, the organization of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery should
choose WAN for their business network. This would help them in producing network to the
entire organization properly.
The wireless technologies are the most suitable option for the organization of Four
Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery. This is mainly because it does not comprise of any type of
complexity or complication due to wires. The proper involvement of any wire is significantly
an extra cost and thus wireless technologies are the best. These are even faster than any other
network as they provide high speed. The most important and significant example of this
wireless technology is wireless fidelity or Wi-Fi.
6. Probable Risks in POS System with Mitigation Plans
The three features are given below:
i) Security: The most important risk or threat in network is security. When the
network is not secured, there is always a higher chance that the hackers could easily hack
their system for the purpose of data theft (Ståhlberg & Maila, 2012). This specific kind of risk
could be easily mitigated with the help of any particular antivirus software for detecting or
preventing the entrance of the hackers within the system.
ii) Privacy: The malware attacks are considered significant risk for privacy. All these
types of malware attacks are common and could be reduced with passwords. Each and every

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customer or employee of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery must have a unique ID and
password.
iii) Confidentiality: Each staff of the Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery must not
breach the data for not allowing anybody to complete these types of activities. Confidentiality
could be maintained with firewalls.
Conclusion
Therefore, from the above discussion it can be concluded that the organization of Four
Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery has eventually utilized several manual registers for the
purpose of tracking as well as maintaining their respective inventories. In spite of using these
types of manual registers, this particular organization of Four Seasons Greenhouse and
Nursery is facing problems while managing their business and is thus suffering from losses
within the business. This organization has undertaken a major decision to acquire the system
of POS in their business. The above report has thus described about the advantages and the
disadvantages of the point of sale system. Moreover, relevant recommendations are also
provided in the report.

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References
Chavali, P., Yang, P. & Nehorai, A., (2014). A distributed algorithm of appliance scheduling
for home energy management system. IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, 5(1),
pp.282-290.
Cui, B., Jiang, J., Huang, Q., Xu, Y., Gui, Y. & Zhang, W., (2016). POS: A high-level system
to simplify real-time stream application development on storm. Data Science and
Engineering, 1(1), pp.41-50.
Frisby, W., Moench, B., Recht, B., & Ristenpart, T. (2012, August). Security Analysis of
Smartphone Point-of-Sale Systems. In WOOT (pp. 22-33).
Gomzin, S. (2014). Hacking Point of Sale: Payment Application Secrets, Threats, and
Solutions. John Wiley & Sons.
Ko, S., Maciejewski, R., Jang, Y., & Ebert, D. S. (2012, June). Marketanalyzer: an interactive
visual analytics system for analyzing competitive advantage using point of sale data.
In Computer Graphics Forum (Vol. 31, No. 3pt3, pp. 1245-1254). Blackwell
Publishing Ltd.
Nikolova, H. D., & Inman, J. J. (2015). Healthy choice: the effect of simplified point-of-sale
nutritional information on consumer food choice behavior. Journal of Marketing
Research, 52(6), 817-835.
Polasik, M., Górka, J., Wilczewski, G., Kunkowski, J., Przenajkowska, K., & Tetkowska, N.
(2012, June). Time efficiency of Point-of-Sale payment methods: Empirical results for
cash, cards and mobile payments. In International Conference on Enterprise
Information Systems (pp. 306-320). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

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Profeta, A., Balling, R., & Roosen, J. (2012). The relevance of origin information at the point
of sale. Food Quality and Preference, 26(1), 1-11.
Rese, A., Schreiber, S., & Baier, D. (2014). Technology acceptance modeling of augmented
reality at the point of sale: Can surveys be replaced by an analysis of online
reviews?. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 21(5), 869-876.
Ståhlberg, M., & Maila, V. (2012). Shopper marketing: How to increase purchase decisions
at the point of sale. Kogan Page Publishers.

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Bibliography
Natek, S. & Zwilling, M., (2014). Student data mining solution–knowledge management
system related to higher education institutions. Expert systems with
applications, 41(14), pp.6400-6407.
Olivares, D.E., Lara, J.D., Cañizares, C.A. & Kazerani, M., (2015). Stochastic-predictive
energy management system for isolated microgrids. IEEE Transactions on Smart
Grid, 6(6), pp.2681-2693.

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Appendices
Appendix 1
POS System
A point of sale system encompasses the hardware, software, and support that manage
that transaction, including credit card processing, and the post-transaction operations that lead
to customer fulfilment, whether in a retail or restaurant setting. The functionality POS
systems can provide is why they are replacing traditional cash registers. A point of sale serves
as the central point for customer data, sales reporting, and can even manage labor and
inventory. Running a business on separate pieces of technology working independently is
high-stress and inefficient. Point of sale systems connect every part of a business, to simply
and efficiently improve operations.
Appendix 2
Case Study
Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery, is a nursery located in Colorado. This small
nursery was like many other small businesses and garden centres. They used manual registers
to track and maintain its inventory as well as determine which products were realizing the
most profit. The profits from the nursery were either "negligible" or a loss. They did not have
access to useful operational data to effectively manage their business. For example, they did
not track or review the margins of individual products. However, they believed that they
needed to do something different for their $1M business operation. Enter a new point-of-sale
system (POS) in 2008. The system allowed the owners to track useful business data from the
sales transactions immediately at the time of the sale; eliminating the need for tracking sales
manually. The system processes and stores data from the sale while updating the inventory as

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well as compiling a sales history. This eliminates reliance on manual entry of sales
transactions and reduction of inventory units for the items sold. POS systems provide much
more than a cash register.