Comprehensive Report: IT in Business - POS System and Implications

This report provides a comprehensive overview of Point of Sale (POS) systems and their applications in business. It begins by outlining the advantages and disadvantages of implementing a POS system, highlighting its role in tracking sales, managing inventory, and improving decision-making processes. The report then delves into the technical aspects, discussing the benefits of a centralized database and the telecommunication networks, such as LAN, used in POS systems. Furthermore, the report addresses the risks associated with POS systems, including security breaches, privacy concerns, and confidentiality issues. The report concludes by emphasizing the importance of securing POS systems and implementing best practices to mitigate potential risks, offering valuable insights for businesses considering or currently utilizing POS technology.

Running head: IT IN BUSINESS 0
IT in business

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Table of Contents
Introduction:................................................................................................................................................1
POS: advantages and disadvantages............................................................................................................1
POS and competitive advantage:.................................................................................................................2
Advantages of centralised database:............................................................................................................2
POS in decision making:.............................................................................................................................3
Telecommunication for POS:......................................................................................................................3
Risks:...........................................................................................................................................................5
Conclusion:.................................................................................................................................................6
References:..................................................................................................................................................6

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Introduction:
It is the report that focuses on POS system and its assorted aspects. POS system is the point of
sale system that has been installed in the business to achieve some of its benefits. This report
argues about those benefits along with its disadvantages to the company. The report also
examines the technical aspects of the system by explaining the cables and the types of networks
used in POS system installed. There are some risks that has been associated with POS system
that has been discussed in the report.
POS: advantages and disadvantages
POS is the point-of-sale system that is installed in the companies in order to manage the sales
and the inventory. As per the case, there are many advantages of installing POS system in the
company (Van Horn, Kearney, Giordano, Good, Dickinson, Wilz Sr, Furlong, Hejl, Walczyk and
Coyle, 2017). POS system helps in tracking the sales transactions which in turn provide the
updates for inventory. It also helps in making decisions for inventory and sales. The prediction
for the inventory can be made accurately with the help of POS system. Reporting is also one of
the most important aspects that are covered by POS system. Making reports helps to take better
decisions. All these activities results in saving the time of the management and thus management
can shift their focus on performing the core activities. Owners can provide responsibility to the
staff as per the established goals and the staff can also track their performance. This suggests that
POS is not only helping the business but also the employees and staff.
As far as the disadvantages of POS system is considered, it has been analysed that POS system
and its installation require the company to spend some of the money and this is an expensive
service as compared to pen and paper work (Edwards, Skoog, Babu and Dorogusker, 2016). In
addition to it, skilled labour is also required to handle the POS system and training needs to be
provided to the staff so that they can work on this part easily and make effective use of it.

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POS and competitive advantage:
POS system of the point of sale system is very effective in achieving the competitive advantage.
As per the case, it has been analysed that after installing the POS system the company have
enjoyed many benefits in some of its business practices. Making effective decisions have become
the competitive advantage for the company (Ezell, Madden and Totterdell, 2015). Thai is
because because the company can easily predict the inventory requirements by analysing the data
of sales that can also be reported in the POS system.
Advantages of centralised database:
Centralized database is the database that is installed in the organisation for the purpose and
storing, managing and sharing the data from the central server and this serves can be accessed
from anywhere. As far as Point of sale system considered, it is also a type of centralised database
that is installed in order store the sales data that can help the firm to predict the inventory level
and manage the sales in future. It is the supporting system that helps the company to achieve
sales target. Some of the major advantages of centralised system in the organisation are:
Data security: as the centralised database is the server that is located and can be accessed from
the single location and point, it is much secured, the data that has been stored in this server of
centralised system is safe and the data can be accessed only after completing a long process. The
access of such centralised server is given only to some people and thus it is secured (Peterson
and Gordillo-Martínez, 2002).
Data sharing: data sharing is also one of the most important advantage and benefit that can be
enjoyed by the companies having centralised database. The data that has been stored in the
database of the company can be shared to the local severs if required. As far as POS system is
considered, it has been analysed that the data that has been stored in the centralized POS system
can be shared to the sales staff at different locations
Recovery of the data: It has been analysed that centralised system has the property of backing up
the data. The data is frequently backed up by the system and this data can be recovered if deleted
in any situation.

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POS in decision making:
POS is the system that helps the organisations to make many decisions. The major decision that
has been taken by the organisation is related to the inventory. This is because the POS system
allows the companies to take records of the sales and this record helps the company to take the
decision on how many units need to be ordered to keep in the inventory (Smith, 2014). Accuracy
of the inventory count by the company results in eradicating the guess work. The business now
can make accurate count of the order units as per the results of the data and leaner inventory can
be implemented in the company. POS helps the company to know those things about the
business that were not known by manual data analysis system. The details from the POS system
also help in analysing the profitability and loss the company is bearing from the sale of the
particular types of products (Sterling and OverDrive, 2014). The costing analysis of those
products can help the management to make decisions over which products need to be sold in
large quantity and which needs to be eliminated. This shift decision cannot be made from manual
data analysis. All the business activities become more effective because of the data availability
through POS. the data can be tracked in better way through POS because it has variety of
elements and aspects that can be extracted by tracking down the data which cannot be effectively
done by manual work. POS system is more error free than manual system. Last but not the least,
the POSS system helps in managing the business very effectively as decision making has become
very easy. The staffs of the company become accountable for the work they are doing which is
recorded in the POS system and thus the information flow also becomes smooth.
Telecommunication for POS:
There are various telecommunication systems that are available to be connected with the POS
system that is being installed in the company. The major telecom networks are:
LAN: Local Area Network
MAN: Metropolitan Area Network
WAN: Wide Area Network

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LAN: it is the network in which the computer network is limited to a single site. It helps in
haring the resources or the data to a limited area (Stallings, 1993). LAN is the network that is
supported mainly by the wired connection to attain greater speed.
MAN: MAN is the network that involves larger area than LAN. It is Metropolitan area network
which includes a whole city. The coverage is wider in this network and thus it has more capacity
to connect more number of devices (Lowenthal, Baxter, Bhade and Mandal, 2017).
WAN: It is the network that connects the whole county or the world. It has the capacity to
connect many devices that are at distant location with the wireless connections (Gupta, 2016).
As far as the case is considered, it has been analysed that LAN is the network that can be used in
this POS system. This is because the POS system is installed in a business that is very small and
is limited to a city (Schroeder, Birrell, Burrows, Murray, Needham, Rodeheffer, Satterthwaite
and Thacker, 1991). LAN is the network that is enough to be installed in this POS system for the
nursery. This is because the business is operating from the single site and it is not that much
expensive to install LAN in the building.
The media that are required to make the connections are wireless and wired. The wired
connection is the connection in which the wires are used to connect the devices and in wireless
connection, the networks are connected or the devices are connected from other technology such
as Bluetooth (Johnson and Maltz, 1996). In this case wired connection is used. This is because
LAN is the network that is only for local area and wired connection can help the network to have
high speed and better connectivity. The types of wires and cable media can be used in LAN
connections.
Unshielded twisted pair (UTP):
As this name suggests, in this type of cable pair of wires are twisted with each other and are not
shielded. The twisted rate of those wires depends on the specificity of the wires and their
categories (Akyildiz and Wang, 2005).
Shielded twisted wires:

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The wires or the cables that are involved in this category are same as the above one but the
differences is that in this case the wires are shielded with the coat and this provides high speed
and connectivity (Sarma, Weis and Engels, 2002).
Multi-mode fibre:
It is the fibre cable that involves the requirement of light to transmit signals. The major
disadvantage of this cable is that it can be used only within the range of 2 kms and thus it may be
problematic for the user to make larger connections by using this cable.
Single mode fibre:
Single model fibres are also the cables similar to multi model fivers. The difference is that they
have single wire and not multiple. They also used light for transmission and thus easy to use but
the length is a drawback here as well (Deaton and Gabriel, 1997).
As per the case using the shielded twisted pairs is very feasible. This is because it provides high
connectivity and has great length that can support the connectivity to the larger area in a
building.
Risks:
There are several risks that are linked with the installation of POS:
Security risks: there are many viruses such as malware and other that can infect the data that has
been stored at the POS system (Prabhakar, Pankanti and Jain, 2003). It has been analysed that
there are some other types of security issue as well that can corrupt the data stored such as
skimming, scraping of RAM, etc.
Privacy:
It is the major issue that the POS users are facing these days. This is because hackers are
everywhere. There is much information that has been stored in the POS system and it can be
hacked by the hackers so easily. This is because the internet is released to the masses and people
have become so techno savvy that they have immense of tactics to take out the data.

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Confidentiality: confidentiality is the very important factor that can be breached when the data is
stored in the database that is centralized nature. It is required that any type of data that has been
stored in the database should be kept confidential and it should not be released in front of many
people even if they belong to the company (Reeder, 2000).
As there are so many risks linked with the installation and usage of POS system at the
organisation, thus it is required to make the system secured in order to avoid any disaster with
the data. Some of the best practices that can be used at the organisations to avoid any type of
risks are usage of strong password that is default to be hacked, using the updated version of the
software, installing updates antivirus software to make the software safe from the attack of
viruses etc.
Conclusion:
It has been concluded from the report that POS is the system that needs to be installed in the
companies so that the manual work of the company can be replaced by the technological
involvement and make the business practices efficient. As per the case, the POS system that has
been installed in the company needs the LAN network as it is at the local level. The wired media
is used for the connection and this is enough to provide the better services. POS benefits the
company in many ways such as reducing the human efforts, reducing the errors and also helps in
making the decisions related to sales staff, inventory, sales prediction etc. the only disadvantage
that has been analysed for POS system is its expenses and training.

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References:
Akyildiz, I.F. and Wang, X., 2005. A survey on wireless mesh networks. IEEE Communications
magazine, 43(9), pp.S23-S30.
Deaton, D.W. and Gabriel, R.G., Credit Verification Corporation, 1997. Method and system for
selective incentive point-of-sale marketing in response to customer shopping histories. U.S.
Patent 5,687,322.
Edwards, T., Skoog, L., Babu, A. and Dorogusker, J., Square, Inc., 2016. Point-of-sale system.
U.S. Patent 9,257,018.
Ezell, D.B., Madden, C.A. and Totterdell, A., Verifone, Inc., 2015. System for secure web-
prompt processing on point sale devices. U.S. Patent 9,208,489.
Gupta, S., 2016. A Comparative Analysis of Wired and Wireless Network
Architecture. International Journal of Emerging Trends in Research, 1(1), pp.05-11.
Johnson, D.B. and Maltz, D.A., 1996. Dynamic source routing in ad hoc wireless
networks. Mobile computing, pp.153-181.
Lowenthal, R., Baxter, D., Bhade, H. and Mandal, P., Chargepoint, Inc., 2017. Network-
controlled charging system for electric vehicles. U.S. Patent 9,610,856.
Peterson, A.T. and Gordillo-Martínez, A., 2002. A Mexican case study on a centralised database
from world natural history museums. Data Science Journal, 1, pp.45-53.
Prabhakar, S., Pankanti, S. and Jain, A.K., 2003. Biometric recognition: Security and privacy
concerns. IEEE security & privacy, 99(2), pp.33-42.
Reeder, K.R., Lucent Technologies Inc., 2000. Point of sale method and system. U.S. Patent
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Sarma, S.E., Weis, S.A. and Engels, D.W., 2002, August. RFID systems and security and
privacy implications. In CHES(Vol. 2, pp. 454-469).

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Schroeder, M.D., Birrell, A.D., Burrows, M., Murray, H., Needham, R.M., Rodeheffer, T.L.,
Satterthwaite, E.H. and Thacker, C.P., 1991. Autonet: A high-speed, self-configuring local area
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Stallings, W., 1993. Local and metropolitan area networks (p. 550). New York: Macmillan.
Sterling, J., OverDrive, Inc., 2014. Point of sale system and method for sampling and purchasing
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