IT for Business: Analysis of Point of Sale Systems and Databases

This report delves into the realm of Point of Sale (POS) systems within the context of IT for business. It begins by defining POS and its role in managing sales, then explores the advantages and disadvantages of implementing a new POS system, highlighting its impact on efficiency, data management, and customer relationship management. The report further examines how POS systems contribute to a business's competitive advantages, including customer satisfaction, market analysis, and innovation. The discussion extends to centralized databases, outlining their benefits in terms of data security, ease of access, and cost-effectiveness, as well as the telecommunication networks used for communication in POS systems. Finally, the report addresses the risks associated with POS systems, focusing on data privacy, confidentiality, and security, before concluding with a summary of the key findings. This report is an analysis of POS systems and their significance to modern business operations, including the use of centralized databases and telecommunication networks.

Point of sale

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Table of Contents
Introduction...........................................................................................................................................2
Answer to question 1- The advantages and disadvantage of the new POS system................................2
Answer to question 2- POS system help the business gain competitive advantages..............................3
Answer to question 3-Centeralized database.........................................................................................3
Answer to question 4.............................................................................................................................4
POS framework helps in making decisions.......................................................................................4
Would information be able to be tracked adequately through manual techniques.............................4
Type of questions that could be answered.........................................................................................4
Answer to question 5- Telecommunication for POS..............................................................................5
Answer to question no 6- Risk associated with POS.............................................................................5
Conclusion.............................................................................................................................................7
References.............................................................................................................................................8

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Introduction
Point of sale can be defined as a service that manages the sales part of the business by
taking care of customers’ orders and returns. In this report limelight is thrown on point of sale
system and risks associated with these systems. Additionally the use of centralized database
system has been discussed and type of telecommunication network used for communicating
in this system has been discussed.
Answer to question 1- The advantages and disadvantage of the new POS system
Point of sale system has changed the ways business work in the market by transforming it
fully automatic and reducing the manual work (SolutionDots, 2014). These systems have
made the work use by removing all the manual work.
Advantage
 The implementation of point of sale system is easy and using this system in the
business improves efficiency and reduces the issue of data redundancy.
 Using point of sale system saves the overall time and efforts by removing the manual
work and making it automatic.
 It also removes the risk of errors caused by humans due to manual work
(SolutionDots, 2014).
 It is beneficial as all the new inventories of products could be tracked immediately.
 It also reduces paper work as reports are generated automatically.
 It also helps the business to know about which products or services is running low so
that plans could be designed accordingly.
 It improves customer relationship management of a business by providing ease to
look up all the transaction related to sale at run time (SolutionDots, 2014).
 It offers detained receipts to customers that help in building trust.
 It save the overall cost as labour and maintenance of system is not required.
 It offers a conformation platform to the clients where they can remain aware of all the
hot deals in the system.
Drawbacks of using POS system

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 Using this system a business is completely dependent on the software this makes
the necessity of keeping the system updated.
 Point of sale system may lead to high security threats if it is not updated
periodically (Huang, et. al, 2014).
 Internet connection is must for web based point of sale system to work.
 It is difficult to fix the hardware failures as it is time consuming job to
troubleshoot the hardware defect.
Answer to question 2- POS system help the business gain competitive advantages
Point of sale system has served out to offer great competitive advantages to the
business by getting more audience and improving the sale of the company. It offers customer
satisfaction which in turn improves the competitive advantage of the business. The detail
analyses help the business stand out in the market (Jindal, et. al, 2018). The business gains
competitive advantage as POS tells about which product that is needed in the market so hat
business could meet the competitor. It helps in innovating new ideas according to the market
need. It also generates reports on regular basis that helps in making decisions for rapid
growth.
Technologies are growing day by day and have changed the way of working. Point of
sale is one such technology that has allowed business to offer online payment experiences
and better customer’s experience (Expert market, 2018). Point of sale system allow two way
communication between business and customer and also improves the customer relationship
management. It helps in segregating the business from other competitors. Point of sale system
is beneficial for the system as it lowers the upfront cost of the business which helps the
business to expand.
Answer to question 3-Centeralized database
Centralised database stores the information at single location rather than distributed
database where data is stored at different servers (Good, et. al, 2018). Centralised database
stores all the similar databases at single location which enhances the performance and
efficiency of data.
There are various advantages of using centralised database. Discussing some of the
advantages:

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 Centralised database offers higher security as there is no data redundancy issue.
 Sharing of data to end users is simple as the data is not scattered at multiple locations.
 Data recovery is easy in case of centralised database as backups could be done easily.
The backup of entire database is easy as it is stored at single location (Dontigney,
2018). In case of failure data could be recovered from backups and system works in a
normal manner.
 Data integrity is easy as data is stored at single location and can be updated easily.
 The cost of centralised database is less as it easy to maintain and there is no additional
maintenance cost. It also decreases the overall space needed for storage of data.
 Centralized database is reliable as compared to local storage and also facilities higher
quality operations (Rese, Schreiber and Baier, 2014).
 Writing new application is flexible as data is not scattered at different places hence it
can be retrieved instantaneously and can be accessed from anywhere in the world.
Answer to question 4
POS framework helps in making decisions
Point of sale system helps the business in making better decisions as the first and the
premier thing that it does is helps in analysing the information according to the driven
choices which is essential for making correct decisions (Blake, et. al, 2015). It helps in
making critical decision as they evaluate the data by reports generated automatically. This
helps in making decisions as it provide a detail structure of all the sales in a business.
Would information be able to be tracked adequately through manual techniques
It is possible to track information through manual strategies yet it requires greater
investment which is difficult in advanced businesses. In the manual method there are chances
of getting confused information which can prompt to take wrong decisions. Tracking the data
takes a considerable amount of time and human efforts that is not effective. It may also lead
to some errors as manual methods sometimes do not result appropriate result.
Type of questions that could be answered
There is variety of questions that could be replied with the utilization of information
that is analysed through POS. Questions related to sales, new deals or money related tasks
can be effectively assisted with the POS frameworks (Adeoti and Osotimehin, 2012). Aside

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from this, the questions with respect to the clients are additionally given which is significant
to the organization at the season of making decisions.
POS helps in managing the business in a better way as it focuses on the areas needed
for making changes in the business. It uses data driven approach in which operations can be
managed in a better way.
Answer to question 5- Telecommunication for POS
There are various telecommunication network and media that could be used for
communicating in a point of sale system. These channels are used to transfer the message,
data signal and information. Various telecommunication channels are:
 Local Area Network- These are useful for connecting computers within the same
organisation that are located in small area. The speed of transferring data packets is
10Mbps and it can reachable to 1000 users at a time (Adeoti and Osotimehin, 2012).
It is controlled by a single entity.
 Wide Area Network- It is used to connect LAN’s in a network. The transferring
speed is dependent upon the distance of routers. It is owned and controlled by
distributed ownership.
 Metropolitan Area Network- the speed of MAN is very high speed and is used to
connect all the LAN’s in nearby area. These are controlled by government
department.
The telecommunication technologies could be either wired or wireless technology. In case
of wired communication devices are connected to each other by using cables and wires
wherein the case of wireless communication devices use radio waves. It is better to use
wireless technology as it offers the advantage of mobility. But its speed is less than wired
network and also suffers from the security issues. Additionally, wired networks are
difficult to install and it also increases but the cost of transmission is high in case wireless
system.
Answer to question no 6- Risk associated with POS
The risk associated with point of sale system is privacy, confidentiality and security.
The data is sometimes not secure on these systems as they give the right to unauthorised user
to access the sensitive data. Privacy of data is necessary to keep sure that data remains

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confidential for this proper access should be assigned about who can read, write and modify
the information (White, 2015). Thus it is important to maintain the security of data by using
proper encryption techniques and software’s to secure the data from thefts.

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Conclusion
It can be concluded from this report that point of sale simplifies the working of a
business by making the components work automatically. Additionally, advantage of
centralised database has been discussed along with telecommunication networks used for
POS system has been discussed. There are various risk associated with these system.

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References
Adeoti, O. and Osotimehin, K., (2012) Adoption of point of sale terminals in Nigeria:
Assessment of consumers’ level of satisfaction. Research Journal of Finance and
Accounting, 3(1), pp.1-6.
Blake III, N.P., Collier, C.L., McGregor, G.M. and Koser, V.R., NCR Corp
(2015). Centralized user preference management for electronic decision making devices. U.S.
Patent 9,021,363.
Dontigney, E., (2018) The advantages of Centralised Database storage [Online]. Available at:
https://itstillworks.com/info-8623828-advantages-centralized-database-storage.html.
[Accessed on: 7th May 2018].
Expert market (2018) Expert Point-of-sale. [Online]. Available at:
https://www.expertmarket.com/pos/pos-system-advantages. [Accessed on 7th May 2018].
Good, T., Kearney, S.P., Giordano, P.A., Van Horn, E., Pierce, R., Colavito, S., Wilz, D.,
Cunningham IV, C.J., Miraglia, M.V. and Xian, T., Hand Held Products Inc (2018). Point-of-
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Huang, J., Ahmad, U., Antonicelli, A., Catlin, A.C., Fang, W., Gomez, D., Loehrer, P.,
Lucchi, M., Marom, E., Nicholson, A. and Ruffini, E. (2014). Development of the
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pp.1573-1578.
Jones, S.C., Barrie, L., Robinson, L., Allsop, S. and Chikritzhs, T., (2012) Point‐of‐sale
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Jindal, P., Zhu, T., Chintagunta, P.K. and Dhar, S.K. (2018). Point-of-Sale Marketing Mix
and Brand Performance–The Moderating Role of Retail Format and Brand Type.

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Rese, A., Schreiber, S. and Baier, D., (2014) Technology acceptance modeling of augmented
reality at the point of sale: Can surveys be replaced by an analysis of online
reviews?. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 21(5), pp.869-876.
SolutionDots (2014) , Top 25 Advantages of Point of Sale System [Online] Avaialble
at :https://solutiondots.com/blog/point-of-sale-system.html, [Accessed on 12 May’18]
Tseng, C.H., Lee, K.Y. and Tseng, F.H. (2015). An updated review on cancer risk associated
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transactions using a mobile device. U.S. Patent 9,053,474.