Analysis of Strategic Information Systems for 7-Eleven Stores Pty Ltd

This report provides a detailed analysis of 7-Eleven's strategic information systems. It begins by examining the company's current organizational structure, which is based on a divisional model, and identifies operational problems such as inefficiency, cost management issues, errors, and internal rivalries. The report then explores the system acquisition method, focusing on commercial software and ERP systems, and includes a system flowchart illustrating the business processes using commercial software. Furthermore, it identifies control problems within the system, such as vulnerabilities to cyber-attacks, and potential fraud risks. Part 2 of the report focuses on the development and adoption of accounting packages, specifically ERP systems, and highlights 7-Eleven's market position and competitive advantages. The report also discusses the leaders in the market and their contributions to the company's success, emphasizing the importance of effective resource management and customer satisfaction. Overall, the report provides a comprehensive overview of 7-Eleven's strategic information systems and their impact on the company's operations.

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Strategic Information System
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Strategic Information System
Introduction
Strategic information system is one of the contemporary means and mechanisms that can be used
by the business corporations for executing various operations and functions in an automated
manner. The business corporations van make use of various information’s systems and tools for
making the operations easier and this will also be affecting the productivity and efficiency of
operations. There are number of tools and mechanisms that has been widely used by the business
firms for delivering the desired quality of services by the customers (Kecmanovic et al., 2014).
ERP and cloud computing are the two biggest examples of these mechanisms that is used by
most of the business organizations for the betterment of the execution of the business practices.
The below presented report is summarized on the strategic information systems used and adopted
by 7 Eleven. 7-Eleven Stores Pty Ltd, Australia’s first choice in convenience, is a private
company and is operating business practices by making use of various contemporary means and
mechanisms and Strategic information system is one of them.
PART-1
1. The current organizational structure
The company deals in providing food items to the customers. It is the private sector based
company that believes in delivering the best quality and extreme tasty fast food for its customers.
The company serves the customers in different cities of Australia and now planning to open their
branches to overseas. In order to achieve the company goals, managers have decided to improve
their current organizational structure. The organizational structure of the company is based on
the divisional organizational structure which means that company focuses on making their
marketing activities better (7 Eleven 2017).

Strategic Information System
The above figure represents the current divisional structure of 7 Eleven. The complete business
process is managed by the CEO. CEO undertakes three different departments commercial
division, residential division, and Government Division. These three departments are responsible
for managing sales, marketing, and service of 7 Eleven. The employees work on the same areas
of a market but under different departments. This makes the marketing process of the company
more enhanced and appropriate. The most important thing to be considered in the marketing
process is proper communication between the organizational departments. The potential
problems of the business are discussed and correspondingly, decisions are taken. This type of
structure allows employees to understand the accounting and economic status of the company
(Karell, 2018).
2. What operational problems
Operational problems in a business create inefficiency in work that has to be managed in an
appropriate manner. The operational problems of 7 Eleven can be resolved by developing
marketing strategies for their current business. Also, a change in the business processes can help
the company to overcome the operational problems that are described below. The divisional
organizational structure provides opportunities to the company to adopt local conditions of the
CEO
Commercial
Division
Residential
Division
Government
Division

Strategic Information System
market very quickly. This helps the managers to analyze the requirements of a market to develop
effective strategies.
 Inefficiency- Many time employees are not able to deliver accurate information about the
market which indeed leads to the inefficiency in interoperability of the business
operations. This situation occurs because there are different functional areas to be
managed by the employees which in turn results to inefficiency in work (Chofreh et al.,
2014). To organize this issue, 7 Eleven has to develop a central organization. This will
help employees to gather accurate information and will accordingly work on that.
 Cost- The set of business activities requires sufficient amount of resources including
financial resources, human resources and many others for which cost is required. 7
Eleven needs efficient employees to organize the functional structure of their business.
Effective management of cost is mandatory to have success in the economic growth of 7
Eleven.
 Errors- too many employees sometimes fail to manage business operations which lead to
errors. Errors can occur in the accounting processes and also while calculating the overall
cost that is used in sales and marketing processes of 7 Eleven.
 Rivalries- The employees do not receive incentives as per the work they accomplish for
the different functional areas of the business. This creates internal conflicts among
employees that affect business processes too. The collaboration of employees being in a
team is important to achieve company’s goals and objectives (Accounting Tools, 2017).
3. System Acquisition Method
There are three different types of software systems which can be used to develop a system which
can be used to manage the business operations. System Acquisition Method is used to ensure that
the current software system is updated (Costa, Ferreira, Bento and Aparicio, 2016). There are no
errors in the system and it is capable of storing a large amount of information. A software system
is utilized by the organizations to arrange the business processes according to the market needs
and also with the increasing demand of customers.
 Commercial Software- This type of software are used to access the information system to
run various application programs. Programs like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint are

Strategic Information System
mostly used by 7 Eleven to develop any documentation or to design a business
presentation. The commercial software can be updated automatically depending on its
type. This functionality promotes employees to work with dedication as the software
system can access with suitable speed (Eden, Sedera and Tan, 2014).
 Custom Software- 7 Eleven does not require specific hardware to complete their business
processes. Therefore, custom software system will not be appropriate for their business.
The demands of customers are accomplished using a commercial software as the
company wants to focus on the sales and marketing functional areas only.
 ERP- The enterprise resource planning systems are used to integrate the business
processes of an organization with the developed marketing strategies (Galliers and
Leidner, 2014). There is a common database which is used to store the accessed
information by the users which can be used for later use. It is used to keep track of the
business statistics such as cost, profits, the effectiveness of marketing strategies,
resources required and many more.
7 Eleven will be using the commercial software system to manage their business processes. The
commercial software protects the application programs from virus and malware attacks. This
system will be helpful for the employees to access the information conveniently.
4. System Flowchart

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This flowchart represents the business processes of 7 Eleven using commercial software. The
process starts with the login screen. Registered users can directly login to the system by entering
their valid email address and password. New users have to sign up first then they will be able to
log in. The next screen is to choose the departments. As mentioned above there will be three
departments. After that, users have to choose which operation they will perform like sales,
marketing or service. Users can access the details of the selected functional areas.
5. Identify any control problems in the system and what sorts of fraud are possible in this
system?
Control Problems- the commercial software system is the open source software which is more
prone to vulnerabilities like cyber-attacks. 7 Eleven stores personal information regarding
customer details, manufacturing of food details and the employee based information. Such data
needs to be protected from the intruders.
 Sales Process- The commercial software system makes it difficult for the employees to
accomplish their tasks as there is no guide or user manual to complete the sales process.
Employees struggle hard to understand how to manage the sales, how to respond to a
frequent request of customers and to manage the decision-making process (Goetsch and
Davis, 2014).
 Transparency- Some of the commercial software systems does not have the required
application programs to manage the needs of employees. Due to this, 7 Eleven face issues
regarding accountability and managing human resources. This problem also affects the
customer-relationships as the employees are not able to effectively communicate with the
customers.
 Flexibility- APIs affect the accessibility of the commercial software system as the 7
Eleven employees need proper guidance to access the system. Also, the requested change
made by the customers are affected due to the slow accessibility of the system (Safari
Books, n.d.).
Frauds that are possible in the system-
 Malware Attacks
 Cyber Attacks

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These are some of the frauds that occur in the commercial software system. This issues can be
resolved using effective anti-virus and anti-malware software which will safeguard the crucial
information of 7 Eleven.
Part 2
Development and adoption of accounting packages
7 Eleven stores Pty. Ltd has a vision of offering the best quality of products and services by
fulfilling the desires and expectations of the customers of the customers. And for attaining the
desired targets the business entity is making use of various systems and software. For instance,
accounting systems are used for managing and storing the data of the business firm, the
transactions executed on daily basis, the data of the customers, and also for managing the
expenses and the revenues earned and for maintaining the other accountability factors associated
with the firm (Hall and James, 2014). The best solution for this case is that the business entity is
required to make adoption of ERP system for managing the operations and executing the related
business practices. ERP is an accounting management system that can be used by the business
organization for managing the core functions and the departments. Moreover, 7 Eleven can
mainly make use of this software package for managing the accounting transactions executed
within the business entity. The development of ERP systems is beneficial for the organizations to
receive profits from their field of business. There is a requirement for a planning model to
evaluate the effectiveness of business strategies.
This system has gained a high level of significance in the past few years and this is due to
intensification of the competitive environment. As the business corporation is a well-established
brand name in the market-place and hence there is the high level of requirement for the adoption
of this accounting system in the organizational structure.
The current market size
7 Eleven has been recognized as the first retail convenience store all over the world. ON the
basis of the research executed it has been noted that the business corporation is operating its
business through its 600 stores all over Australian regions and 55000 stores all over the globe
thus making the entity world’s second-largest private company (More 2018).

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Leaders in the market and what gives them the competitive advantage
Competitive advantage can be achieved by effectively managing the cost of the company. The
company owners have to review about the strengths and weakness and how they can achieve the
trust of customers. Leaders play a vital role to bring standards for a company (Hill, Jones and
Schilling, 2014). Another important thing to follow is to focus on the quality of product or
service that is delivered to a customer. Besides price, customers more often look out for the best
quality products. Therefore, should identify the market demands and create business strategies. 7
Eleven is the excellent performers in terms of managing the resources like financial and human
resources. Taking into consideration the leaders of a market, the staff members collaborate
effectively and give their best to the organization (Romney and Steinbart, 2009). The company
manager looks after the hiring of skilled candidates, the accounts manager checks on the bill
payments and the sales/marketing officer are responsible for creating and monitoring
advertisements for the company. The team of graphic designers continuously prepare the
trending’s creative for food pictures and other related creative. Supplier of the company brings
the best details about retailers and wholesalers to supply the food items (Hunton, JMcEwen and
Wier, 2015). They are also responsible for contacting with other food dealers. Investors plan for
creating better opportunities for 7 Eleven is to expand their business globally. These leaders are
focused on improving the current business process by either replacing it with a different business
strategy or adopting a new technology to manage them.
Challenges
 Inefficiency- The out-dated commercial systems leads to inefficiency in business
operations. This problem needs to be resolved as this could imbalance the information
and make the sequence of information inaccurate. This affects the profitability of the
company compared with other competitors in the market (IES 2016).
 Errors in processes- Inaccuracy in the data affect the specifications of each project. This
also affects the efficiency inaccessibility of the system.
 Less Storage Space- the commercial software system does not provide sufficient storage
space for the application programs that need to be installed for an information system.

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 Maintenance- the commercial software system requires maintenance cost to update the
system for better accessibility and reliability (Islam et al., 2010). Frequent expenses cause
the decrease in finance of the company.
 File Organization- manual records are difficult to manage in the organizations like 7
Eleven. The sequential arrangement of information is important which is not possible by
commercial systems (Richardson, Chang and Smith 2014). They require hardware to
support the installed application programs.
Solution to the challenges
Use of ERP system will be beneficial for the company to manage both internal and external
business processes. Such systems are efficient to use and do not require much maintenance. The
ERP systems are automated which require less manual operations (Jirava and Toseafa, 2017).
The benefit from ERP systems is that these provide integration of data with the current business
processes. It guides the employees to perform regular activities on an information system
(Liebowitz and Frank, 2016). These systems are reliable to use. Reduction of manual work by
using automated information system is the best suitable solution for 7 Eleven. Manual records
create inaccuracy and redundancy in data. It is important to maintain consistency of the company
based information.
Recommendations
It can be recommended for 7 Eleven to develop effective business strategies for their business.
These strategies should be based on the current statistics of the marketplace and the requirements
of customers. The company can also make use of effective graphics to make the advertisements
more attractive to the target audience. At the back end process, a company should use a database
system. This will allow users to store a large amount of information and can use multiple
operating systems at a time. The company should the most convenient option for expanding their
business such as to implement an affordable software system which is upgraded and automated.
Conclusion

Strategic Information System
After summing up the above-presented analysis it has been inferred that the strategic information
system is one of the integral mechanism that will be proven beneficial for the business
organization in various operations and functionalities. These systems make the execution of
operations smoother and easier and hence 7 Eleven has been recommended to make adoption of
the systems for the betterment of the business.

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