CIS5100: The Role of Decision Support Systems in Modern Business

This essay provides an overview of Decision Support Systems (DSS) and their importance in business decision-making. It highlights how DSS, as computer-based information systems, support management, operations, and planning levels within an organization, particularly in rapidly changing environments. The essay emphasizes the benefits of DSS, such as facilitating more informed and faster decision-making, using sophisticated tools like Excel to analyze complex sales data. It also discusses the implementation of supplier markup types for discounts, the selection of appropriate freight types like Neptune Freight for cost-effectiveness, and the strategic choice of countries for importation, such as St. Lucia, based on lower exchange rates. The conclusion underscores the significance of DSS in increasing sales, solving complex problems, and enabling companies to outperform competitors. Desklib offers a platform to explore similar solved assignments and past papers for students.

Decision Support Systems 1
Decision Support Systems
By
Nistha Dangol
CIS5100 Database Management System (DBMS) & Decision Support System (DSS)
Professor’s Name
University Name
Date

Decision Support Systems 2
The process of Decision making has been thought to be a mere process that would take
time for the management of any business or company in the world. The ideas have been all
thought since years that people have to be in meeting to make decisions. This essay discusses the
what decision support systems are and what benefits it has to the business.
Decision Support System is a computer based information system that supports business
or organizational Decision making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations, and
planning levels of an organization and help to make decisions, which may be rapidly changing
and not easily specified in advance. DSSs include knowledge-based systems. A properly
designed DSS is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile
useful information from a combination of raw data, documents, personal knowledge, or business
models to identify and solve problems and make decisions. Typical information that a decision
support application might gather and present are inventories of information assets including
legacy and relational data sources, cubes, data warehouses, data marts, comparative production
figures between one period and the next or the projected revenue figures based on production
and demand assumptions. (Jain and Raju, 2016)
A Decision Support System is the most appropriate tool for this project as it has benefits
to the Holst company. The tool is powerful and has analyzed a complex sales data using excel
sophisticated features. The massive analysis and information that has been compile and reported
can be used to solve the real business problems of the company.
The benefits the tool has is that It helps Decision making. The management of the
business will be able to make decisions which are more informed and the process be made faster.
By this, much attentions that were put on implementing other projects would be shifted and the
information analyzed by the tool be used to inform their directives and decisions thereafter
accomplishing the company’s mission and goals. (Chen, 2017)
The general results of the Decision Support System Result worksheet and Scenario
Summary, the appropriate markup type to apply or rather implement is the supplier type. This
specific type of markup has benefit because of discount. Suppliers affect the cost fee for the
shipping of the products. When the business makes volumes of orders, the suppliers would be
able to offer discounts and the items would be supplied at a reduced price. This will therefore

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enable the business to offer the same benefit to its customers and affect the customers consuming
behavior and size of the customers will also increase.
The decision of the business to increase to offer discounts on large orders is great idea as
it impacts the business by increasing its profit margin. The result of discounting orders that are
large will increase the volume of the sales for the orders, this later results to increase in the
number of orders that are made by customers. By adjusting the prices of orders, the business is
able to affect image of its brand and the brand image would be known to large volume and
number of others customers thereby converting potential customers to fulltime customers.
Neptune Freight is the most appropriate Freight type to use because it provide a cheaper
cost. Since the most important factor in every business is cost, Freight provides its services at a
cheaper cost that fits the budget of the business. Their prices are affordable and compared to its
service, they are offering the best overall.
The result of different freight types recommended would result to the business profit to
increase or reduce as a result of the cost being transferred from customer to business. This is
basically depended on the many factors and parameters. Technology and industry expertise and
experience being the crucial factor. Both domestic and international freight services are the best
because it allows the company to have access to global items and also allows the business time to
concentrate on generating activities that generate revenues.
The country to which the business imports its products and goods is a great factor. At the
moment according to the scenario, St. Lucia is the appropriate country for importation of the
items as it has a lower exchange rates. This will affect the cost to be paid in importing the
products.
The decision to make on rethinking of the choice of country to import is mainly the price.
Different countries have different variations in charges of imports. Other issues include
environmental and legal issues between countries that affect the choice to import.

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In conclusion, we can see that Decision Support Systems are important tools that any
business that wants to increase its sales can implement. From the benefits of timely decision
making process and problem solving capabilities to efficiently solving other complex problems
with data that are variant, a company would increase its sales and rapidly grow above its
competitors and take over the marketplace.

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Reference List
Jain, R. and Raju, S., 2016. Decision support system in agriculture using quantitative analysis.
Udaipur: Agrotech Publishing Academy, pp.pp.42-50.
Chen, J., 2017. Decision Support System - DSS. [online] Investopedia. Available at:
<https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/decision-support-system.asp> [Accessed 17 Jan. 2019].