Addressing Fibre Fashion's Information System Issues: A MIS500 Report

This report addresses the information system challenges faced by Fibre Fashion, an Australian apparel company. The company struggles with inefficient marketing and sales due to its reliance on spreadsheets for data management, leading to issues with customer service and strategic decision-making. The report identifies the limitations of spreadsheets, including limited collaboration, errors, poor data visualization, and difficulties in scaling and reporting. To solve these problems, the report recommends implementing an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, specifically Oracle ERP Cloud. The report highlights the benefits of ERP systems, such as a centralized database, flexibility, automated information generation, data analysis capabilities, and improved customer relationship management (CRM). The implementation of Oracle ERP Cloud is proposed to streamline business procedures, enhance financial management, and improve decision-making through data-driven insights and automated reporting. The report concludes by emphasizing the potential of ERP to transform Fibre Fashion's operations and improve its overall performance.

Running head: FOUNDATIONS OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS
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Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Background to the Issues...........................................................................................................2
Literature Review.......................................................................................................................3
Recommendations to the Company...........................................................................................4
Enterprise Resource Planning................................................................................................5
Marketing Information Systems.............................................................................................7
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................8
References..................................................................................................................................9

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Introduction
The information systems are a sequence of components in order to collect, store and
process data and to provide knowledge, information and digital products, Business
enterprises and other companies depend on information systems in order to conduct and
manage their operations, interact with their clients and suppliers and compete in the market.
The information systems are utilised in order to run interorganizational chains of supply and
the electronic markets.
The report deals with the Fibre fashion company that deals with providing apparels to
the people of Australia. The report discusses about the issue of the company that the company
is facing. The report provides a literature review of the issues those are identified. The report
provides recommendations of information systems that can be installed in the company in
order to solve the problems of the company.
Background to the Issues
The Fibre fashion is a company that provides apparels to the people of the company.
The company operates all over Australia and its head office is situated in the city of
Melbourne. The company has around 110 stores all over the Australia and is an E-commerce
Company. The company has a website from which the customers can purchase various
products. The operations of the company include inbound logistics, operations, outbound
logistics, sales, marketing, and services to the customers (Andersson, Axelsson & Rosenqvist,
2018).
The main issue is in the marketing and the sales of the company. The company has
poor marketing strategies due to which the sales of the company has minimized. Due to this,
the company is devoid of revenue and profit. The company cannot provide the customers
with excellent services due to which the company is losing its customers. From the excel

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sheet of the company, it can be found out there are no new customers of the company and
there are more number of order cancellation that purchasing the products (Andersson, R.,
Axelsson & Rosenqvist, 2018).
The other problem and the most important problem that the company is facing is the
use of spreadsheets in order to note own the number of customers, the amount of profit, the
number of new customers in all the stores and many such things. The employees of the
company manually take down these data and during the rush hours the data can be wrongly
taken down and it create a huge problem in the company. All these databases are stored in a
single computer system and evaluating the spreadsheets one by one is a huge problem for the
company (Swanson, 2017). Due to his problem, the company cannot make effective
marketing strategies so that they can reach the customers and the sales of the will maximize.
The company can also provide excellent services to the customers and the revenue of the
company will also increase. The research question is that “how can the problems of
spreadsheets can be solved”?
Literature Review
It can be said that various companies utilise spreadsheets in order to run the operations.
Various companies are dependent on the spreadsheets in order to manage their important
business procedures that include calculation of revenue, number of customers in the
company, number of new customers, managing the inventory of the company and many
more. Various companies sometimes consider that they do not have many choices but to
utilise the spreadsheets in order to conduct their important procedures of business. The
company that has the spreadsheets cannot handle the operations of the company and the sales
of the company go down due to the use of spreadsheets (AlTarawneh & Thorne, 2017). The

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spreadsheets lacks in various features due to which the company fails in their operations. The
features of spreadsheets in which it is severely lacking including:
 Collaboration is limited: Working with spreadsheets means that only one person at a time
can access and then the edit the data, without sending or taking a copy of the data, in
various cases, the recipients of the spreadsheets receive the wrong version of the
spreadsheets and that can lead to errors in the data (Bazeley, 2018).
 Errors: A study says that 88% of the spreadsheets have errors in them. The spreadsheets
do not much accuracy and it can be a drawback to the businesses.
 No easy data visualization: The users can develop charts and graphs but combining any
kind of visualization of data can be frustrating and takes a lot of time.
 No connection with the systems of marketing: If a company has marketing automation
systems and the sales side of the company is working on the spreadsheets then there will
be miscommunication (Johnson & Berenson, 2019). A lack of combination means that
prospects and the customers can receive information those are redundant.
 Hard to scale: once the company and the list of the company starts increasing, the
spreadsheets are not of any use. However, larger the spreadsheets, it will contain more
errors and broken problems.
 Reporting is bad: It is very tough to compile all the versions of the spreadsheets into one
master copy and after that, the managers have to integrate them into reports. Therefore,
more complicated the data more tough is the reporting (Bhuvaneswari & Natarajan 2018).
Recommended Solution to the Company
The company should stop using the spreadsheets as it has a number of disadvantages.
Due to the use of spreadsheets, the company is facing large number of problems in marketing
and sales. The company cannot make proper strategies of marketing, as it is very hard to

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develop reports from the spreadsheets. It becomes very difficult for the Fibre fashion
Company to manage the important business procedures and the operations of the company.
The recommendations that can be provided to the company include an Enterprise resource
planning systems and marketing information that can assist the company in making proper
strategies of marketing, improving the operations of the company and providing excellent
services to the customers.
Enterprise Resource Planning
The Enterprise resource planning is modular software that is designed in order to
combine the main functionalities of business procedures of a company. An ERP system
mainly includes components of softwares those are called modules and these modules
generally focuses on the important functions of business such as accounting, finance,
production, customer relationship management and many more. The organizations can utilise
the modules that they require in order to their specific business (Madanhire & Mbohwa,
2016). The company can implement Enterprise resource planning in order to assist them in
marking and sales and replace the spreadsheets.
There are different features of ERP that will help the company to resolve the problems. The
features include:
 Central common database: The ERP implements a centralized common database known
as DBMS. It is an important feature of the ERP system. The company can get help from
this as all the data is entered and stored one time and all the departments of the company
can use it at the same time (Alomari et al.,2018). This will help in the eliminations of
various flaws with utilising spreadsheets.
 Flexible and open database: The organizations are dynamic in nature and the ERP
provides flexibility in order to respond to the changing requirements of the company. The

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company can anytime attack or detach any modules at any time without affecting the
other modules (Hasan et al.,2019).
 Automation generation of information: An ERP system offers tools of business
intelligence such as decision support system, easy warning systems and many more.
These help in permitting the operations of manufacturing to make appropriate decisions.
All the business and the financial information will generated automatically from the data
that was entered already in the ERP system. These data will used to produce reports from
the data of various stores of the company. The managers will use these reports in order to
make important decisions.
 Data analysis: ERP collects and process data from the all the functions of business. It
capitalizes on that information through data analysis. ERP evaluates data relating to all
the operations business including the data of client, statistics of production and many
more (Chofreh, Goni & Klemes, 2018). The analysis of data provides easy access to
important data of business and provides the tools in order to track the productivity of the
organization and the efficiency.
 Customer Relationship Management: The customer relationship software is very
important for various reasons. A CRM is a good option for the company whose base of
customers has become very large for the use of spreadsheets. Spreadsheet is efficient until
the company finds itself spending much time updating the spreadsheets (Jirava &
Toseafa, 2017). The CRM within an ERP centralize the information of the customers and
it permits fast access when working with other parts of the system.
The ERP provides various advantages to the company (Deshmukh & Kumar, 2016). The
advantages of ERP include:
 ERP can save businesses by streamlining the procedures
 It offers a system that is unified that can reduce the labour, training and the IT cost.

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 It facilitates planning and reporting through upgraded data and analytics.
 It enables visibility into the important parts of the business such as sales, inventory and
capital of the company.
From the features and advantages, it can be said that the Fibre Fashion Company can
implement the ERP system in the company. It can solve the problems of spreadsheets and
marketing and sales in the company by data analysis, reporting and automation.
Oracle ERP cloud
The Fibre Fashion Company can implement ERP cloud provided by Oracle. It is one of
the best ERP solutions that can help the company to solve its problems. Oracle ERP Cloud is
an innovative management solution for organizations of various sizes (Elbahri et al.,2019).
The ERP is based on cloud software that will help the company in order to streamline the
procedures. The platform of the ERP is simple and scalable in order to automate the business
procedures of the company. The Fibre Fashion can implement this ERP so that it can get help
in its planning and procurement, reporting, managing the projects, management of risk and
many more. The benefits that Oracle ERP Cloud will provide to the company are (Salapura &
Mahindru, 2016):
 It is a robust platform and it will deliver the company with security, analytics and
integration tools needed in order to execute its business
 The Fibre Fashion needs the financial module the most. One of the important modules in
this ERP is financials. It is scalable and combined system of financial management that
provides a solution of reporting that is built on the model of analytics. This module
produces accurate and timely data in order to support the reporting and management.
The company can then solve the problem of spreadsheet as the ERP will store the data in
its cloud and there will be no errors while entering the data manually. The ERP will also

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produce reports consisting of charts based on data analysis and it will help the managers of
the company to take important decisions based on the report. It is highly recommended to
implement the Oracle ERP Cloud so that the problem of spreadsheets diminishes.
Figure 1: Oracle Cloud ERP
Conclusion
From the report, it can be inferred that the Fashion Fibre is in great trouble because of
the problems in marketing and sales and the use of spreadsheets. The company does not have
any new customers and there are no proper strategies of marketing. The company cannot
provide excellent services to the customers due to which the revenue is falling. The report
discusses about the issues that the company is facing. The report discusses about the literature

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review of the issues that is found out. The issue is that the company uses spreadsheets and
that is why it is very complicated for the company to take important decisions. The report
provides recommendations of information systems that can be implemented. The information
systems that can be implemented include ERP. These information systems will help the Fibre
Fashion Company to resolve the problems.
Appendices
In the first week of planning, I have researched about background issues of the fiber
fashion company and found out a research question that can be helpful in finding out the
solutions for the company. In the second week I have researched about the various literature
associated with the issues of the company and searched about the various information system
that can be implemented in the company. After vast research, I have found that ERP system
and specifically Oracle Cloud ERP can be helpful in mitigating the risk of the company.

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References
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AlTarawneh, G., & Thorne, S. (2017). A pilot study exploring spreadsheet risk in scientific
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