MIS500 - Fibre Fashion: Information System Case Study Analysis Report

This case study examines Fibre Fashion, a small to medium enterprise (SME) in the fashion industry, and its current information system. The assignment highlights the limitations of using Excel spreadsheets for managing customer data, sales reports, and brand information. The research question focuses on identifying the drawbacks of Excel, suggesting alternative information systems, and evaluating their benefits. The literature review explores the disadvantages of Excel, including difficulties in managing advanced information, lack of security, vulnerability to errors, and unsuitability for agile business practices. It then explores alternative information systems such as CRM and ERP systems. The assignment provides a comprehensive analysis of the issue, comparing various information systems and their potential solutions for Fibre Fashion. The student recommends a suitable information system to replace the current one for improved data management and business efficiency. The assignment concludes with a summary of findings and references to support the analysis.

Running head: FOUNDATIONS OF INFORMATION SYSTEM
Foundations of Information System
Case Study: Fibre Fashion
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Background to the issue.........................................................................................................3
Research question...................................................................................................................3
 Research the issue and present a literature review.........................................................4
 Analysis of the literature including other examples.......................................................8
 Recommended Solution.................................................................................................8
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................9
References................................................................................................................................11

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Introduction
Information systems are actually implemented in in a business organisation for
running the operation system because it has the ability to consist of all the generated data
within the business to organise in such a way that it helps to answer for the question and
solved problems constituting the business and its benefits (Kochan, Nowicki, Sauser &
Randall, 2018). Information system is mostly a software that helps an organisation to analyse
and store data in such a way that this raw data can be turned into a Useful information for the
decision making system within the organisation when in need. The main components of
having an information system within an organisation is computer hardware computer
software data bases and data warehouses, telecommunications and human resources and
procedures. Fibre Fashion is an organisation which mostly has been serving Melbourne for
the past 20 years with it clothing product (Cope, Mikhailova, Post, Schlautman & McMillan,
2017). The wardrobe range that the organisation provides makes the organisation and
assembly or a small to medium Enterprise that mostly is a women centric organisation. The
organisation has developed its business based on the idea of women empowerment and this is
why the lead executive of the organisation are all women. It has also been found that the
organisation uses its sales report stored in in spreadsheet that is regarded as the information
system for fibre. This is why it is required that the organisation needs an improved system as
the permanent information system of the organisation. This would be done by representing
the research based process to find out the issue that you organisation is facing in the current
times forming a set of research questions. This research questions would form the base of the
issues present and the findings based on the literature review which would be done by
reviewing a set of journal papers represented by previous authors. Then these literatures
would be compared with one another to find out the best possible solution for Fibre Fashions
to use as their information system.

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Background to the issue
As it has already been discussed about the organisation of Fibre Fashions, the
organisation is a small to medium enterprise or an SME. The organisation has a set of
customers and is trying to acquire more. The number of new clients within the organisation
are few and they have represented an online store for the company as well. For the
organisation assistant has been developed that has the ability of capturing the information of
the customers and the location from which the customers are viewing the online store. There
are several aspects of the viewing patterns that the system captures information about the
customers and their shopping habits categorized by new client, plants that placed an order but
then cancel, clients who viewed and order but did not place, orders to come, cancel orders,
sales and return, a section that are not interested to you, the app based orders the viewed look
book and the ordered packet. The entire system gathering information stores everything in a
spreadsheet, where the data is categorised according to the said divisions. Therefore it is
clearly seen that the customer details are stored in the spreadsheet along with the notes
written about each transaction, order, cost of good maintained through the spreadsheet. Self
this clothing line represent different brands, the Excel spreadsheet has to accept the way there
is an ability of tracking the brands which is very inefficient. This is why the organisation is
looking forward to an information system that would told the data as the spreadsheet used to.
The organisation is also looking forward to improve the information system since there are
many drawbacks of using Excel sheet as information systems.
Research question
The research questions can be formed as below:
 What are the drawbacks of using Excel sheet as information systems for a
small and medium sized organisation like Fibre Fashion?

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 What information system can be utilised for replacing the current and existing
information system for the organisation?
 What are the benefits of utilising the current information system replacing the
old Excel spreadsheets for storing information and data regarding the
organisation?
 Research the issue and present a literature review
According to several researches it has been found that any business wants to
maximize their profits with the help of an information system to price their goods and service
at the right level. It is also implies that many business procedures traditionally has used the
information system conducted to excel spreadsheet for calculating the optimum information
regarding the business generated data on a daily basis (Kluza & Wiśniewski, 2016). However
there is also been several concerned ideas about the drawbacks that Excel spreadsheets of a
place in business. It is not implied that an Excel spreadsheet is absolutely flawed and cannot
be introduced in any organisation for developing the information system but given the latest
times, the solution that which software provides to manage the information within the
organisation is rather outdated and old-fashioned. Therefore it is vulnerable to making errors,
being corrupt or manipulated easily. The different authors have presented several drawbacks
on using an Excel spreadsheet as the information system as the next section of this literature
review is going to discuss.
According to the author Chatvichienchai (2017), the use of Excel spreadsheets as
information system can have several drawbacks which can be listed as below:
i. The difficulty of managing advanced information: Typically, it is found that
when Excel spreadsheet is used in a business for managing the transaction related data based

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on Cost plus pricing, there is no proper idea gathered for the profitability of goods and
services to ensure the selling price ignoring the host of other factors.
ii. The lack of control and security: Excel spreadsheet cannot provide complete
control and security for managing the information of the organisation. This is because the
gathering of data has the probability of making a file too large for the capacity of Excel
spreadsheets. If it is about gathering the business data on a day-to-day basis it has a capability
of running extremely slow since the data resides in a single file and it is ever increasing
(Stach, Pryss, Schnitzlein, Mohring, Jurisch & Reichert, 2017).
iii. Vulnerable to corruption and fraud: There are several notable information
about the Excel files been compromised and organisations resulting into losses over millions
of dollars due to the vulnerability of the Excel spreadsheets inheriting the lack of control.
iv. Human error: Excel spreadsheets are vulnerable to human error, even the most
trivial ones of them as well. It has been reported that on an average, an Excel spreadsheet has
one out of every 20 cells within when data is stored (Zou, Lun, Cipolla & Mohamed, 2017).
v. Unfit for Agile business practices: Another drawback of Excel spreadsheets has
extremely less expertise of fitting into agile business practices. Spreadsheet files has become
highly personalize for a user develop application and therefore it cannot accept exchange for
the user.
vi. Not fit for collaborative work: Excel spreadsheet are scattered throughout an
organisation in such a way that if the organisation has it spread over several countries former
the exchange of data can only occur through the sharing of the spreadsheets via Email
(Jacobs, Robinson & DePaolo, 2019).
vii. Incapable of quick decision making: Extracting data from different departments
are very difficult and needs summarising of information that might be helpful for the

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management of the company to make the best decisions according to the collected data and
information but the process is extremely time consuming.
viii. Unsuitable for continuity of a business: The data stored in excel spreadsheet
are extremely difficult to keep in a single place, except if they are at the hands of a non it
personal who is extremely unfamiliar with the backing up and storage of data with effective
practices implemented. It is also unfit for a prior disaster management.
As the author Nguyen and Khorev (2019), has stated, Excel spreadsheets can be one
of the most versatile and essential software for any business but it becomes extremely
difficult to organise, analysis, manage, forecast and visualise data because it is mostly used
on individual computers. When an organisation is looking for accessing the documents from
any part of the world and wants to collaborate with a team working on different physical
zones in real time forming a team, it become extremely difficult as a procedure to collaborate
and work with Excel spreadsheet. Emailing the Excel spreadsheets back and forth is a
confusing and time consuming process with no idea about the correct version of the right
spreadsheet file. This is why alternative of Excel spreadsheets must be used at this point of
time in every business so that the Microsoft Office Suite can be discarded for incorporating
the benefits of cloud based information system for the whole team and for incorporating all
the business aspects to an information system that Excel spreadsheets could never implement
because of its drawbacks (Asuo-Mante et al., 2016). There are several alternatives for Excel
spreadsheet that an organisation can use for making a proper collaboration. There are various
information system tools that are mostly free and cloud-based so that a team can access them
quickly. The variance include Google sheets, Apache open office, Zoho Sheet, Microsoft
Office Excel online, LibreOffice, ThinkFree, Numbers for MacBook, FreeOffice 2016,
Spread32 and many others (Airinei & Homocianu, 2017). Utilising these cloud based systems

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provide several benefits to an organisation for consolidating the software expenditure and
saving time simultaneously.
As it has been stated by Airinei and Homocianu (2017), customer relationship
management is also a developed technology which is primarily known as the CRM system in
the latest industry market. This is a system which has been developed for managing the
information related to the relationships of the company and the interactions it has with the
potential for existing customers. It has the ability of improving the business relationships with
the customers and other stakeholders for increasing the profitability of the organisation.
There are several CRM systems that can be utilised for a company as it leads to the
generation of using the previous customer data for introducing market campaigns for service
satisfaction and purchase and also for taking feedback from the customers so that the business
understands if the customers are satisfied or dissatisfied or what changes are needed in the
organisations to meet the needs of the customers.
Another author has stated that supply chain management or SCM are also extremely
important for an organisation as an information system to increase and improve the
management of time control, customer satisfaction, profitability and the speed of response
with the utilisation of innovation for meeting the requirements of the customers (Coleman &
Blankenship, 2017). However the importance of supply chain management is only integrated
into the success of a business organisation that allows the quick delivering of products to the
end users. It is industry specific and only provide the benefits to an organisation who needs to
deliver products to the customers.
Some organisations also prefer the utilisation of enterprise resource planning for ERP
system as the information system within the organisation. It is a software that facilitates the
effective communication between different departments and also allows the employees to

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access the most important information that can be taken from any possible location within or
outside the organisation (Airinei & Homocianu, 2017). Streamlining information and
processes throughout various departments and acquiring of important data from any possible
place is what the ERP systems provide. It optimises business processes such accurately and in
real time that the information becomes absolutely reliable for the decision making. This
system also eliminates unnecessary operations and data.
 Analysis of the literature including other examples
As per the analysis based on the literature review and other examples of different
organisations using for making use of the cloud based software systems for managing the
information within the business by exchanging Excel spreadsheet, every organisation has
gained benefits ever since the incorporation (Naik, 2016). It is extremely obvious that all the
problems that Excel spreadsheets incorporated within the small and medium organisations
would have been too much of resource expenditure (Krogstie & Reijers, 2018). The small and
medium-sized organisations cannot a Fort the resources spend over Excel spreadsheets bring
about misinterpreted or manipulated data. It would also not be possible to detect the correct
version of the data presented. This is why it is important that an organisation like Fibre
Fashions replaces their existing Excel spreadsheets as their information system and take up a
new and improved technological advancements of cloud based information systems for
storing the data that the business generates every day.
 Recommended Solution
As per the analysis of the Literature and the business software for Fibre Fashion, it is
evident that the business is looking forward to exchange the Excel spreadsheet into
incorporating the new and improve cloud based information system. The cloud based system
is trying to be implemented only because the number of customers has the potential of been
increased exponentially with the latest times and the spread of the organisation. Therefore it

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is evident that every organisation is looking forward to making a competitive place in the
market and if Fibre Fashion still uses Excel spreadsheets for managing the information
system, the flaws and drawbacks would bring the organisation out of the market without a
competition. On the other hand, the ever increasing client data would be extremely difficult to
be handled by an Excel spreadsheet and this is why cloud based system is recommended for
Fibre Fashions as it would not require a physical storage unit for the business generated data
and client information. It can easily be said that the best recommendation that can be made
for the organisation to take up and cloud based information system, Google sheets would be
the most effective alternative for Excel spreadsheets. It was similar to that of Excel but offers
a much more time saving feature for implementing charts and graphs, as it has built in
formulas, pivot tables and also conditional formatting. It is also free for people having a
Google account, and all the information that resides in a cloud does not have to be worried
for as it would be back tough periodically within the file. Except for China, the file can be
accessed from anywhere in the world with a device connected to internet. It also supports
great collaboration and also version control. Multiple users can work on the same document
by using Google sheets at the same point of time and all the changes would be saved
automatically.
Fibre Fashions is looking for a system that would enhance their business in the future
with special focus on marketing and sales. A small to medium organisation, the inclusion of
enterprise resource planning for ERP system must be the best at this moment for the business.
This is because the information gathered in the business would be reliable for collecting data
from internal sources throughout the organisation whenever it would be required with the
help of an ERP system. It has such a vast spread all over the organisation that if unauthorised
entity wants to gather data from any other department, after providing proper authentication
of authorisation, the data can be gathered from anywhere within the organisation. The

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business data within an ERP information system is extremely safe and secure. It does not
allow gathering of data from any place possible without proper authentication of
authorisation. It can be recommended that using an ERP system for the business is extremely
required because the collection of data from the internal sources can be done on an Ad Hoc
basis. The transactions of the customers and the associated costs along with it can also be
used for other purposes of creating a proper communication within the customers and the
organisation. Feedback can also be taken from the customers based on the products that they
have received and with the capturing of data for the provided feedback. How the business can
improve the efficiency of their productivity is by enabling the feedback within the services. If
the feedback is positive then the business should look forward to enable innovative ways for
betterment of the service and even the negative feedback can be taken as constructive
criticism.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it needs to be said that the information system that the organisation had
been using for several years now has become outdated. Excel spreadsheet cannot be used for
the as an information system for Fibre Fashions since it is extremely outdated and prone to
further errors as per the generated data in the business and the increasing quantity of it.
Literature review has also revealed the different types of errors a business can suffer with the
utility of Excel spreadsheet even at this point of business. This is why it is recommended that
the organisation replaces the Excel spreadsheet for information management and focus more
on utilising Google sheets which is a classic use of Excel spreadsheet but with an enhanced
technology of cloud computing and handling the same spreadsheets from different access
locations in real time. It supports collaborative work and can be handled and controlled from
any parts of the world, except China.

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