Business Report: Analysis of Inventory Management at Laurel Pty Ltd

This business report analyzes the inventory management processes of Laurel Pty Ltd, an Australian car parts manufacturer. It identifies internal control weaknesses within the expenditure and inventory management systems, such as workforce shortages, mishandling of documents, scrap management issues, and inadequate inventory counts. The report assesses the impact of these weaknesses on the company's operations and financial performance. Furthermore, it explores the potential benefits of implementing Business Intelligence (BI) and digital dashboards, particularly in improving decision-making, streamlining manufacturing processes, and enhancing overall efficiency. The report recommends specific internal controls and BI tools to mitigate identified weaknesses and support Laurel Pty Ltd's goal of business expansion.

Running head: BUSINESS REPORT
BUSINESS REPORT
Name of the Student
Name of the university
Author note

1BUSINESS REPORT
Executive Summary
The business report focuses on finding out the internal control weaknesses of Laurel Pty Ltd.
It is important to realize the control weaknesses so that the organization can achieve its goal
of expanding its manufacturing business. Laurel Pty Ltd desires to implement business
intelligence tools to its business operations and thus here the implications of the same have
been discussed. Dealing in manufacturing of car parts, inventory management system needs
improvisations which have made the company to think about implementing digital
dashboards. The report concludes by showing how the company can be benefitted by using
digital dashboards.

2BUSINESS REPORT
Table of Contents
Purpose of the report..................................................................................................................3
Business Intelligence Systems...................................................................................................4
Impact of Business Intelligence and digital dashboards on.......................................................8
Decision making of management...........................................................................................8
Efficiency of manufacturing process.....................................................................................8
References................................................................................................................................10

3BUSINESS REPORT
Purpose of the report
The main aim of the report is to analyze the processes involved in inventory
management system of Laurel Pty Ltd. The analysis will be done form the point of purchase
to the point when these purchased products are used in manufacturing process. The paper will
discuss on the intrinsic control weaknesses in the inventory management system and
associated expenditures. The impact of the control weaknesses will be discussed as well
along with the advantages or scope of introducing business intelligence and digital
dashboards in the organizational structure. The various ways in which the use of business
intelligence and digital dashboards can affect the organization will also be considered.
Internal Control Weakness Impact of the weaknesses Ways to mitigate the
weaknesses
1) The receiving team consists
of only 3 officers.
According to the work load
there should have been 6 people
to control the receiving
department. The shortage of
work force puts extra pressure
on the existing employees.
Extra pressure forces them to
work for extra hours which can
affect their efficiency.
The only way to mitigate this
problem is to deploy more
persons in the receiving
department and dividing the
work load.
2) Mishandling of inventory
documents
Managing inventory requires
handling many documents such
as recording the number of
items required and the number
of items present in stock. If
The company can make use of
computerized records to match
the records and mismatch in
these can help in recognizing
the mistake.

4BUSINESS REPORT
these documents are mishandled
then the company can face
revenue losses. For example
suppose one of the department
heads responsible for inventory
purchases commits some
mistake in the process then it
will affect the whole process
thereafter.
3) Handling of scrap Laurel Pty Ltd deals with spare
parts of cars thus there should
be a proper check of the parts
being categorized as scrap.
Employees can tag parts in
good condition as scrap and sell
them in the market outside.
The company can avoid this by
deploying a person for checking
the product at the last stage to
identify whether these are scrap
or good parts.
4) Inventory count The loss of some spare parts
which are physical count of
inventory was not taken into
account by comparing the same
with existing records of the
inventory.
The products available at the
inventory should be kept a
check on so that loss of
products or mismanagement can
be identified and the person
responsible penalized for the
same.
Business Intelligence Systems
Business intelligence refers to a specific set of architectures, technologies and
processes that are effective in converting raw data into meaningful data driving business

5BUSINESS REPORT
actions. It is considered as software and services suite that has the potential to transform
volumes of data into actionable knowledge along with intelligence. Business intelligence
significantly impacts organization’s strategies as well as the operational business decisions.
Business Intelligence is supportive decision making that is based on facts and makes use of
historical data instead of assumptions. Business intelligence tools are used to analyze data,
create reports, dashboards, graphs, maps, summaries and charts providing its users with
detailed intelligence about the nature of the business (Shollo & Galliers, 2016). As per the
studies a real-time organization without using business intelligence can never experience
proper growth in its business operations. There are various advantages of using business
intelligence and they are as follows:
1) Creating key performance indicators on the basis of the available historic data.
2) Identifying and setting benchmarks for different processes related to business operations.
3) Implementing business intelligence in the operations of the organization can help in
identifying the market trends aiding to spot the business problems that are required to be
addressed immediately.
3) Business Intelligence helps in visualizing data that in turn can enhance the data quality
thereby helping taking better decisions.
4) Business Intelligence systems can be used by large as well as small and medium scale
enterprises.
Business Intelligence systems are a combination of operational data and analytical
tools. These provide complex informations to the decision makers and aid them in making
important decisions. Business Intelligence systems improvise the timelines of the various
business operations and have a significant impact on quality of inputs associated with the

6BUSINESS REPORT
decision making process. Business Intelligence helps in understanding the potential of the
organization for example technologies, regulatory environment, state of art, trends and
associated future directions in the competitive market (Zheng, 2017). Business Intelligence
Systems are implemented by the help of three basic steps that are as follows:
a) Raw data is extracted from the corporate databases. This data can be shared among
multiple systems.
b) The data that is extracted is transformed into the data warehouse.
c) Making use of the business intelligence systems a user can ask for queries, request for ad-
hoc reports or might conduct other such analysis.
The advantages of using Business Intelligence are as follows:
1) Boosting productivity of the business operations- With the help of business intelligence,
businesses can create reports on a button’s click which saves a lot of time as well as
resources. The employees of the organization get more productive with the tasks assigned to
them.
2) Improves visibility- Business intelligence helps in improving the visibility of the business
operations thereby identifying areas that need attention.
3) Fixing Accountability- Business Intelligence is effective in assigning accountability within
the organization. It ensures that someone is always accountable for performance of the
organization against its set targets.
4) Helps in streamlining the business operations- Business Intelligence helps to simplify the
business operations by automating analytics providing scope for predictive analytics,
benchmarking and computer modeling.

7BUSINESS REPORT
5) Allows easy analytics- Business intelligence allows its nontechnical as well as its non-
analyst users in collecting and processing data at a faster rate. This helps in saving time and
making the processes faster.
Digital dashboards in inventory management system can serve as key information
management tool. These are made use of for tracking key performance indicators and other
vital informations associated with business operations. The current performance of any
organization can be easily analyzed by the help of digital dashboards as these can simplify
complicated sets of informations (Romney et al., 2013). Digital dashboards include interface
that can be customized as per the requirements of the business operations. The digital
dashboards have the ability to keep a record of real time data from different sources which
serve as advantages over the old static dashboards. Business Intelligence dashboards serve as
an integral element of most of the leading cloud based analytics platform. The digital
dashboards are considered as critical tools for the enterprises that help in deriving long term
insights from the growing storehouses of data. This in turn helps the organizations to make
better decisions and analyze the volumes of data. There are sophisticated dashboards that
provide multiple visualization scope for critical data. The advantage of digital dashboards is
that it keeps its end users involved in the business intelligence dashboard design. Some more
benefits of digital dashboard are as follows:
1) The digital dashboard can be customized according to the requirements of the business.
2) These improve connection in between staffs by easy sharing of data.
3) Simplify the process of data analytics as well as the process involved in sharing data.
4) Saves time by enhancing performance of the operations and preventing data overload.

8BUSINESS REPORT
Impact of Business Intelligence and digital dashboards on
Decision making of management
In case of Laurel Pty Ltd inventory management, business intelligence can help in
organizing the work in a better way. The inventory management system involves four
important steps that are purchasing, receiving department, inventory management and
accounts payable. These processes involve many persons such as the five departmental heads
handling the inventory purchases, purchasing clerks, receiving officers along with inventory
management team and accounts payable team. Each of them is responsible to handle certain
documents and here is the scope of digital dashboards. Digital dashboards can help Laurel
Pty Ltd in channelizing the vital resources and the workforce to enhance the business
productivity. It will help in decision making as the records of the inventory can be obtained
on a button’s click (Romney et al., 2013). Digital dashboards will help Laurel Pty Ltd to
access various information related to inventory in an easy way thereby helping in the decision
making process. The costs related to decision making will be reduced by making use of
digital dashboards.
Efficiency of manufacturing process
Laurel Pty Ltd has less number of employees in some of its departments such as the
receiving department thus in this case digital dashboards can provide the users with a quick
glance of the proceedings in the manufacturing processes. The intelligent dashboards can
help Laurel Pty Ltd in making use of data in the organizations’ core operational system that
in turn will aid in gaining insight into making improvements in the manufacturing process.
The manufacturing process is a complex process thus using analytics dashboards, Laurel Pty
Ltd can allow the employees to visualize data spotting patterns and exceptions in these.
Efficiency and productivity are vital in case of manufacturing processes and thus
implementing digital dashboards will help the organization in enhancing the same. In

9BUSINESS REPORT
business processes such as manufacturing data are kept to the concerned departments only
which prevent the departmental goals to be shared and reduces efficiency (Romney et al.,
2013). Thus with digital dashboards all involved in the business can get to know about the
real time data ensuring transparency. The digital dashboards can be customized which
provides an added advantage of who can access the data and modify the same. The digital
dashboards can help the organization in evaluating the metrics related to manufacturing in a
daily basis.
Digital dashboards will boost the productivity of the company and help in reducing
costs. Business Intelligence systems ensure good return on the investment made reducing
costs, enhancing revenue, improving margin and driving cost avoidance. This will help
Laurel Pty Ltd to ensure qualitative return on investment by improving business process
efficiency, productivity of the employees, strategic decision making and satisfying the
customers. Digital dashboards will provide real time reports of the operations which can be
utilized to handle the inventory in a better way.

10BUSINESS REPORT
References
Romney, M., Steinbart, P., Mula, J., McNamara, R. & Tonkin, T. (2013). Accounting
Information Systems (Australian edition). Frenchs Forest, NSW : Pearson Australia
Shollo, A., & Galliers, R. D. (2016). Towards an understanding of the role of business
intelligence systems in organisational knowing. Information Systems Journal, 26(4),
339-367.
Zheng, J. G. (2017). Data visualization in business intelligence. In Global Business
Intelligence (pp. 67-81). Routledge.