Point of Sale System in SME: Four Seasons Greenhouse Case Study

This case study examines the implementation of a Point of Sale (POS) system at Four Seasons Greenhouse & Nursery in Colorado. It explores the advantages and disadvantages of the new system, including real-time transaction monitoring and streamlined operations, while acknowledging drawbacks like connection reliability issues. The study highlights how the POS system facilitated gaining a competitive advantage through accurate inventory management and data-driven decision-making. It also discusses the benefits of a centralized database for improved data preservation and cost reduction, along with recommendations for telecommunication options such as LAN. The case study also addresses potential risks associated with the POS system, like security vulnerabilities. Finally, it concludes with recommendations for e-commerce integration, feedback collection, an IT expert team, and inventory setup improvements to further enhance the business's performance.

Running head: POINT OF SALE SYSTEM IN SME
Point of Sale System in SME: A Case Study of
Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery
Name of the Student
Name of the University

1POINT OF SALE SYSTEM IN SME
Executive Summary
The report reflects that the point of sale system in Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery has
bring a new approach for the organization to carryout business. The organization is located in
Colorado. It needed to have an IT framework that can support the business and provide the way
of achieving competitive advantage. The organization has been operating business under the
governance of POS system perfectly. There are many recommendation for Four Seasons
Greenhouse and Nursery to leverage its consumers to have a good relationship. The aid in
decisional making is always a great support by the system toward business.

2POINT OF SALE SYSTEM IN SME
Table of Contents
1. Introduction:................................................................................................................................3
2. Advantages and Disadvantages of the New POS System:..........................................................3
3. Gaining Competitive Advantage through POS System...............................................................4
4. Advantage of Centralized Database:...........................................................................................4
5. POS System Facilitate Decision Making:....................................................................................5
6. Recommend Telecommunication Options:.................................................................................6
7. Risks That POS System Brings:..................................................................................................7
8. Conclusion:..................................................................................................................................7
9. Recommendations:......................................................................................................................7
References:......................................................................................................................................9

3POINT OF SALE SYSTEM IN SME
1. Introduction:
The point of sale system refers to the technology where the consumers carryout the
payment regarding the products or services they buy from an organization. It is considered as the
collaboration of hardware and software for allowing the vendors for taking transactions and
making the everyday business operations easy (Smith 2014). Small and medium organizations
are making progress in implementing information system within their environment. The POS
system is capable of streamlining business process of SME so they can achieve more than just
having flexibility regarding processing daily transaction.
The report is consisted of various consequences of implementing POS system in the Four
Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery. The organization is situated in the Colorado. The organization
used to have manual processes to manage their business. The report describes advantages and
disadvantages of POS system, POS system in gaining competitive advantage, advantage of
having centralized database.
2. Advantages and Disadvantages of the New POS System:
The biggest advantage of the point of sale system is that business owners of Four Seasons
Greenhouse and Nursery are able to monitor the transactions related to sales in real time and this
happens in automated way. The system has enable the organization to eliminate the need of
manual procedure in the core sales transactions (Rodríguez 2017). Operating and managing the
business has become easy for Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery owners can get crucial
information by inputting, monitoring and sharing data. Decision making is a significant part of
the business that assist in elaborating the business if properly observed and processed. As the
point of sale system in Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery stores accurate data, decision

4POINT OF SALE SYSTEM IN SME
making quality automatically gets better. As the current and accurate inventory related data is
available to the owners of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery, they need not to make
assumptions during placing orders (Nikolova and Inman 2015). Gaining competitive advantage
through having all the required data at hand has been possible.
The most harmful drawback of the system that has been observed so far is the connection
reliability is low. The software modifications are costly and it is not always possible for the
organization.
3. Gaining Competitive Advantage through POS System
The biggest competitive advantage of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery is managing
inventory in accurate manner. The system has allowed the owners of the organization to handle
inventory, flag entities for reorder and evaluating the sales patterns (Lee et al. 2014). The POS
system in Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery has been more than a cash register, as it has
been processing in the core of sales transactions and allowing the organization to track and share
useful data. The accuracy of data is crucial for business to achieve competitive advantage as
these data and information is used for decision making process. The decision of taking a new
perspective, “real costs”, offered the opportunity for shifting the production of Four Seasons
Greenhouse and Nursery to more profitable state thus making the business more competitive
(Miller et al. 2017). The organization was not able to identify and understand this kind of
business opportunity prior to development of POS system.
4. Advantage of Centralized Database:
The primary advantage of having a centralized database for Four Seasons Greenhouse
and Nursery is having an improved data preservation process. In case any hardware fault occurs,

5POINT OF SALE SYSTEM IN SME
the fault-tolerance setup in the centralized database is able to handle the situation. Four Seasons
Greenhouse and Nursery is processing on numerous business and consumer related data. In such
circumstances, having a secured environment for data is crucial (Eskandari et al. 2016). The
centralized database is suitable for developing a security policy and infrastructure that can
support the data security needs of the chosen business. The policies will be developed in such
way that the possibility of damaging the data by a laptop will be minimal.
Another good advantage of centralized database that has helped Four Seasons
Greenhouse and Nursery to grow business is cost reduction in overall price of implementation of
database (Kuipers et al. 2016). The maintenance cost of the centralized database is always less
than maintaining several small databases. Having redundancy and high quality equipment have
made the centralized database able to implement a secure and proper database system in the
environment of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery system.
5. POS System Facilitate Decision Making:
Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery’s business processes are consist of managing
business internal activities, managing customer request, generating reports, managing inventory
and many more. The POS system allows the organization to have full access to the business
process related data and generate patterns for making the improvements in various parts of the
business. The activities is always under control of the business owners (Anderson et al. 2015).
Tracking the information in effective manner is not possible. The biggest issue with
tracking the data through manual process is error in data accuracy. It has been observed in past
that Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery’s manual processes are tend to be full of errors. The

6POINT OF SALE SYSTEM IN SME
organization was running their business in loss or negligible profit while having manual business
processes.
The questions can be asked by customers, management, inventory employees and few
more personnel of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery. The consumers are tend to have
intention of asking questions regarding the status of their delivery or products available
(Karpovsky and Galliers 2015). The management can be asking questions related to gaps in the
business processes, inventory staff can ask questions about the potential amount of raw materials
required to purchase to fulfill customer need for a specific season.
The information can be evaluated to identify customer buying patterns, effect of weather
on the nursery, inventory assumptions and much more (Bennett 2015). The outcome of the
evaluation will allow Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery to have better understanding of
business opportunity and constraints.
6. Recommend Telecommunication Options:
LAN is the abbreviation of Local Area Network. This can be achieved through wired or
wireless network. In case of WAN or wide area network, the coverage area of the network is
larger than LAN. The wide area network is the combination of various small network coverage
areas connected with each other. MAN or metropolitan refers to a network that is consisted with
various network nodes connected with each other (Kokkinos et al. 2016). LAN is the best
solution for Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery as this will allow the organization to have it
whole network within a secured place from where conducting cybercrime is nearly impossible.
The network will be developed using wired and wireless technology both. In case of connecting
remote devices like laptop will be connected to Wi-Fi and machines like inventory in/out

7POINT OF SALE SYSTEM IN SME
checking will be connected using RJ-45 cable (Vaquero and Merino 2014). The routers will be
connected to each other through mesh topology so that if a router gets damaged then another path
can be used for data transfer, results into uninterrupted data flow.
7. Risks That POS System Brings:
In terms of security risk, the physical attacks on the system can a harmful situation.
Either employees of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery or an intruder can connect to the
network using internal devices like authorized laptops to harm the system. The system can be
accessed by the wireless network designed for remote devices. The cybercriminals can access to
the network of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery’s system if they are able to crack the
password of the network (Edelman, Jaffe and Kominers 2016). They can reconfigure the whole
network to damage the business process.
The hacker can get into the system and steal the personal information of staff and
customers. The same way the hackers can get their hands on the business confidential data like
customer buying history, generated patterns, information of various deals and much more.
8. Conclusion:
From the above report it can be concluded that the system has been able to resolve the
main issues of the business. The effect of the system could be seen right after the implementation
of the system. The decision making is a significant process of Four Seasons Greenhouse and
Nursery’s business. The system is a good source of simplifying and increasing the quality of
business decision making. The data validation and verification process ensures that only
authorized and accurate data is stored into the database. The database is centralized and it allows
the system to be secured. Using the LAN will allow the organization to have a secured network.

8POINT OF SALE SYSTEM IN SME
It will be difficult for cybercriminals to hack the system as the whole network will be located
into one place.
9. Recommendations:
E-Commerce: The organization can develop and integrate an e-commerce website and
mobile app within its system. This will allow the organization to attract more customers. The
business will be able to expand its business from local area to whole nation. The business will
flourish with the new huge customer base.
Taking Feedback: The feedback will be taken from end users and customers to identify
the areas in which modifications can be done. The feedback will be analyzed and the points
directing to a specific modification will be prioritized. Based on the priority, the changes will be
done.
Having an IT Expert Team: As the organization will not be contracting with any third
party organization for their services, the system maintenance will be a hard process. An IT expert
team will be able to handle any technical fault within the organization system.
Improving Inventory Setup: As the inventory is the core of the business, the organization
need to have a proper inventory setup to support business properly. Having barcode reader in the
inventory will eliminate the error due to having manual product storage process.

9POINT OF SALE SYSTEM IN SME
References:
Anderson, D.R., Sweeney, D.J., Williams, T.A., Camm, J.D. and Cochran, J.J., 2015. An
introduction to management science: quantitative approaches to decision making. Cengage
learning.
Bennett, E.L., 2015. Legal ivory trade in a corrupt world and its impact on African elephant
populations. Conservation Biology, 29(1), pp.54-60.
Edelman, B., Jaffe, S. and Kominers, S.D., 2016. To groupon or not to groupon: The profitability
of deep discounts. Marketing Letters, 27(1), pp.39-53.
Eskandari, S., Clark, J. and Hamou-Lhadj, A., 2016, July. Buy Your Coffee with Bitcoin: Real-
World Deployment of a Bitcoin Point of Sale Terminal. In Ubiquitous Intelligence &
Computing, Advanced and Trusted Computing, Scalable Computing and Communications,
Cloud and Big Data Computing, Internet of People, and Smart World Congress
(UIC/ATC/ScalCom/CBDCom/IoP/SmartWorld), 2016 Intl IEEE Conferences (pp. 382-389).
IEEE.
Karpovsky, A. and Galliers, R.D., 2015. Aligning in practice: from current cases to a new
agenda. Journal of Information Technology, 30(2), pp.136-160.
Kokkinos, P., Kalogeras, D., Levin, A. and Varvarigos, E., 2016. Survey: Live migration and
disaster recovery over long-distance networks. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 49(2), p.26.
Kuipers, M.A., Beard, E., Hitchman, S.C., Brown, J., Stronks, K., Kunst, A.E., McNeill, A. and
West, R., 2016. Impact on smoking of England9s 2012 partial tobacco point of sale display ban:
a repeated cross-sectional national study. Tobacco control, pp.tobaccocontrol-2015.

10POINT OF SALE SYSTEM IN SME
Lee, J.G., Henriksen, L., Myers, A.E., Dauphinee, A.L. and Ribisl, K.M., 2014. A systematic
review of store audit methods for assessing tobacco marketing and products at the point of sale.
Tobacco control, 23(2), pp.98-106.
Miller, S., Pike, J., Chapman, J., Xie, B., Hilton, B.N., Ames, S.L. and Stacy, A.W., 2017. The
Prevalence and Marketing of Electronic Cigarettes in Proximity to At-Risk Youths: An
Investigation of Point-of-Sale Practices Near Alternative High Schools. Journal of Child &
Adolescent Substance Abuse, 26(2), pp.119-124.
Nikolova, H.D. and Inman, J.J., 2015. Healthy choice: the effect of simplified point-of-sale
nutritional information on consumer food choice behavior. American Marketing Association.
Rodríguez, R.J., 2017. Evolution and characterization of point-of-sale RAM scraping malware.
Journal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques, 13(3), pp.179-192.
Smith, D.C., 2014. Preventing point-of-sale system intrusions (Doctoral dissertation, Monterey,
California: Naval Postgraduate School).
Vaquero, L.M. and Rodero-Merino, L., 2014. Finding your way in the fog: Towards a
comprehensive definition of fog computing. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication
Review, 44(5), pp.27-32.