Strategic information system - Assignment PDF

Running Head: Strategic Information System
H&R Group
Strategic Information System

Strategic Information System 1
Part 1
H&R Group is a leading manufacturer of mineral oil such as white oils, paraffin waxes,
petroleum jellies, motor oils, lubricants, process oils, ozone protection waxes, etc. Company is
based in Hamburg, Germany. Company is engaged in various industries such as refineries,
speciality production plants, etc. Operations of organization are expanded at international level
and it situated in Africa, Asia, America, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe (H&R Group,
2018).
H&R Australia has various operations including distribution and warehousing in New Zealand
and in Australia. Company’s head office is situated at Laverton North in the west of Melbourne.
There, organization operates its primary manufacturing plant, warehouse, technical service
department and customer service centres are located.
In relevance with the organizational structure, it helps the organization to manage its activities in
a systematic manner along with directing effective ways so that the desired goals and objectives
could be attained. With the help of an effective organizational structure, organization could
easily determine the faulty areas through which performance is getting declined. With the help of
this analysis, organization could adopt advanced and effective measures so that the errors could
be mitigated and performance of the organization could be uplifted. H&R started as a small
company in 1919 in Hamburg, Germany and from then, company has successfully made its
effective place in the international market in several industries. Their major product offerings
include white oils, base oils, plasticizers, etc. In Australia, major functionalities of organization
is providing technical services, customer services and warehousing related services. Company is
almost 100 year old but they have been always as per changing business environment.
Organization has adopted latest technologies in order to make our refineries up to date as per
latest trends as well as to serve in attractive niche markets (Galliers & Leidner, 2014). In order to
manage large number of operations in an effective manner so that the desired goals and
objectives could be accomplished, it is required for the management of organization to adopt
advanced measures through which regular evaluation and analysis could be conducted for the
purpose of enhancing organizational performance regularly.

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As per Galliers & Leidner (2014), apart from the organizational structure, information
technology has also developed an effective place in business environment. H&M Australia
provides services such as timber, food, pharmaceutical, carton, telecommunication, etc. and in
order to make these services as per customer’s requirements, organization has adopted latest
information technology measures. This has also helped the organization to enhance its reliability
over target audience along with uplifting customer satisfaction. With the help of information
technology, organization provides customisation option to its customers and renders exactly the
same services as per customer’s requirements. With the help of information technology
measures, organization has uplifted its performance in an effective manner along with making
better customer relations. Customer could directly connect with the organization and share its
views and suggestions with the organization with regards to their services rendered. It helps the
organization to improvise its services along with moving towards automation as per latest trends
of business environment (Hunter, 2010).
This assessment will focus over requirement of information technology in H&R Group along
with the requirement of accounting software so that accounts, ledgers and other financial
statements could be managed in an appropriate manner. Further, this assessment will move
towards analysis of organizational structure and the strategic management policies in accordance
with the functionalities of organization.
Organizational structure
Organizational structure of H&R group is one of the crucial factors contributing towards
organizational success and growth. It also influences organization towards innovation and
development with regards to enhance its service’s efficiency. Organization structure is majorly
responsible for its success as well as it is also responsible for organizational failure. In relation
with the scenario of H&R Australia, traditional hierarchy is being followed along with adopting
unique features from other types of organizational structure (Kavanagh & Johnson, 2017).
Mainly organizational success and growth is the result of its key employees’ talent, knowledge
but organizational structure has also contributed towards organizational expansion and success
across the globe. As per Kavanagh & Johnson (2017), management of organization continuously
amend its operations so that the market requirements as well as to cope up with latest business
trends. Primary strength of their structure is that it is effective enough to support business

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performance in order to ensure leadership in the industry. However, further changes have been
applied in the business with the motive of enhancing organizational performance by improving
its capabilities and adopting innovative practices. Rapid improvements and creative innovative
strategies have made the organization to stand on the leading position as well as by fulfilling
target audience’s needs and wants.
Major features of organization structure of H&R Australia:
 Scope of improvement; and
 Increase in the services (Morecroft, 2015).
With the help of these characteristics in organizational structure, organization ha easily uplifted
its market share in the global market and this is the reason, organization is known as the leading
manufacturer of mineral oil such as white oils, paraffin waxes, petroleum jellies, motor oils,
lubricants, process oils, ozone protection waxes, etc.
Apart from these benefits, there are several challenges and issues which an organization needs to
face while performing at international level. The major challenge which occurs while operating
at international level is rules, regulations, laws, legal compliances, etc. If any of this compliance
will be ignored, organizational performance may get affected. Thus, H&R’s organizational
structure has appropriate strengths to control all subsidiaries’ operations from headquarter only.
Apart from this, there are sundry other challenges such as irregularity in performance of tasks,
poor quality services as well as appointment of inefficient employees. Under an effective
organizational structure, it is required for an organization to meet its target audience’s needs and
for this, major things required is efficiency of employees. In a service-based industry such as
H&R Australia, it is required for the organization to appoint appropriate, knowledgeable,
talented as well as experienced employees who could fulfil customer’s needs as well as be able
to customise the services as per customer’s requirements. Lack of communication strategies, lack
of managerial control and slow process of transferring information from headquarters to
subsidiary companies are another factors through which organizational performance get affected
in negative manner (Pearlson, Saunders & Galletta, 2016). In order to avoid these glitches, errors
and deficiencies amongst several procedures, management of organization has adopted

Strategic Information System 4
traditional type of organizational structure along with regular amendments so that the desired
goals and objectives could be attained.
Operational issues
While performing organizational functionalities, major factors which affect performance of the
organization are external environmental forces. These forces are political, technical,
environmental, economic and social factors which have strong impact over organizational
performance. If these factors will be in favour of organizational functionalities and policies,
organization will grow otherwise, it will decrease organizational performance. Dynamic business
environment, constant changing customer’s needs and competition are major factors which act as
operational issues and affect organizational performance. Competition plays vital role in
enhancing as well as in decreasing organizational performance and act as the major operational
issue (O'Neill, Beauvais & Scholl, 2016). Competition is the key to innovation and adaptation of
unique measures to make its products unique and distinct from competitors. In relevance with
this, customer get benefits because to gain competitive advantage, every company engaged in the
competitive environment adopts several measures so as to increase its product offerings and to
make its separate image from its competitors. Apart from this, price, quality of the products and
services plays crucial role in order to enhance organizational performance. New entrants in the
industry acts as the threat for existing companies because they provide better quality services at
low rates with the objective of setting up market share. With this regard, H&R Australia requires
to adopt defending strategies so that the acquired position could be attained along with mitigating
the issues with the objective of gaining competitive advantage and to maintain its leading
position in the market (Fine, 2018).
According to Mehta, et. al., (2016) there are sundry aspects of the organizational culture and
their impact of organizational performance. These aspects have negative as well as positive
influence over and to reduce the impact of these factors, organization is required to adopt
advanced measures to cope up with the changing business’ needs (Padgurskas, et. al., 2016).
System acquisition method
As per Nagaraj & Farinato (2016), with the rise in information technology, every field is
adopting this technique to move towards automation along with enhancing organizational

Strategic Information System 5
efficiencies. These measures are effective enough to gain competitive advantage, in improvising
organizational performance along with improving the effectiveness of their products. With
regards to the operations of H&R Australia, software technology is the major and most effective
weapon with the objective of enhancing organizational performance along with acquiring
competitive advantage. With the help of software, organization would easily be move towards
automation which will reduce the consumption of time as well as accomplishment of tasks (Seo,
2013). Performance could easily be uplifted using information technology and majorly the fields
which require improvement in relation with satisfying target customer’s needs as well as making
organizational functionalities effective as well as error free.
Primary values of H&R Group are to serve quality services along with proactive approaches of
environment protection and safety. This has helped the organization to make its unique position
in the target market along with developing reliability (Tarhini, Ammar & Tarhini, 2015).
Figure 1: Sales flowchart of H&R Australia.

Strategic Information System 6
This image shows the sales procedure of H&R Australia. This procedure shows the booking of
customer regarding availing services, following is the explanation regarding sales procedure:
 In the first stage, customer contact order department of the organization and requirements
in relation with the quantity required needs to be filled in reacquisition form. If purchase
requisition form gets passed and verified by the sales team, customers are asked for
payment and for the time duration for which warehousing or any type of services are
required (Tasevska, Damij & Damij, 2014).
 After asking payment and other details, if customer agrees to pay the asked amount,
invoice is being made for the particular service; otherwise negotiation is not done at the
workplace of H&R Group.
 For the time period, customer pays the organization to avail the service, all type of
facilities are being provided and before completion of the time period, it is asked by the
customer whether he wants to renew it or wants to end after completion of time period
(Yeh & Xu, 2013).
Control issues
According to Zeng & Skibniewski (2013), due to lack of control, various issues and challenges
arise within workplace. In relevance with this scenario, it has been analysed that H&R Australia
does not have appropriate accounting measures. This is affecting organizational performance
along with irregularity in maintaining accounts and recording transactions. Organization was
using traditional accounting measures and chances of error and fraud is more in this system in
comparison with the accounting software. This software are effective enough to record daily
transactions, maintain ledgers, develop account books along with making financial statements in
an effective manner. Imposing control over using accounting software is an easy task and
management could privatise the access and impose limitations over using advance features of
software (Ha & Ahn, 2014). This will help the organization to gain better outcomes as compared
to the previous accounting measure. Below scenarios showcase issues faced by organization due
to lack of control:
 Maintaining quality of the services and products rendered. Due to international level
operations, headquarter could not appoint an employee only for keeping eye on the

Strategic Information System 7
functionalities of subsidiaries. Software technology and other advanced measures will
easily help the organization to reduce the impact of these factors.
 Traditional system of accounting leads to generate inappropriate outcomes. Chances of
fraud and unauthorised access of third party increases.
 Apart from this, adaptation of automation, software, and other informational technology
measures, organization needs to face several other challenges and issues such as leakage
of data, unauthorised access, etc. (Hoch & Dulebohn, 2013).

Strategic Information System 8
Part 2
Development of accounting software
Organization will be able to record its daily transactions with ease as well as in effective manner.
Recording initial entries in accounting software leads to make all further books of accounts
automatically. This reduces efforts as well as also saves time. In comparison with the manual
accounting technique, a separate team is required to maintain accounts for every party as well as
to record daily basis transactions. Chance of errors and miscalculation, fraud, etc. was also high.
After introduction of software accounting measures, organization is required to maintain a
separate team for accounts but still, it has enhanced whole organizational efficiency. With the
help of this, organization could showcase its clear as well as transparent picture amongst its key
customers, investors as well as other stakeholders. Organization could also raise high
investments from public by showcasing the last year’s profit and dividend distributed amongst
the shareholders with just click in accounting software (Kurbel, 2016).
Market size
H&R acts as the leading manufacturer of mineral oil, lubricants and several other products and
services. This has helped the organization to expand its business in international market. Today,
organization is operating in various parts of the globe such as Asia, Europe, Australia, New
Zealand, etc. In relevance with the market size of organization, it has covered more than 60%
market share in Australia and New Zealand. Our strength in hydrocarbon based emulsions, with
particular emphasis on wax based emulsions, with state of the art manufacturing equipment,
enables us to lead the Australasian market in developing and supporting this technology.
Leaders in the Market
Huber Engineered Martials, Minakem, Hansa Group, etc. are prime players of mineral oil
producing industry along with providing warehousing and distributing services. All companies’
business is expanded at international level. In relation with this, organization is required to
perform its operations in accordance with the maintaining leading position in the target market
for a longer period of time (Craft.co, 2018).

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Gaps and Challenges
Before adaptation of information technology and ERP framework for accounting measures and
for other purpose in worjplace, appropriate gaps and challenges must be recognised. This helps
the organization to build an effective framework in order to improvise organizational
performance along with gaining competitive advantage (Hoch & Dulebohn, 2013).
From the aforesaid information, it can be conclude that H&R Australia’s major product offerings
include white oils, base oils, plasticizers, etc. In Australia, major functionalities of organization
is providing technical services, customer services and warehousing related services. Company is
almost 100 year old but they have been always as per changing business environment.
Organization has adopted latest technologies in order to make our refineries up to date as per
latest trends as well as to serve in attractive niche markets. In order to manage large number of
operations in an effective manner so that the desired goals and objectives could be accomplished,
it is required for the management of organization to adopt advanced measures through which
regular evaluation and analysis could be conducted for the purpose of enhancing organizational
performance regularly.

Strategic Information System 10
References
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H&R Group. 2018. H&R Australia-New Zealand. [Online]. Accessed from:
https://hur.com/en/hur-ag/locations/australia-new-zealand/hr-anz-pty-ltd/. [8th May 2018].
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