IT for Business: POS System Evaluation, Competitive Advantage & Risks

This report assesses the advantages and disadvantages of a new Point of Sale (POS) system introduced in 2008, highlighting its role in minimizing manual workload, tracking inventory, and providing comprehensive data on sales. While the system offers benefits like improved data integrity and enhanced decision-making capabilities, it also presents challenges such as high implementation costs, security risks, and potential power failure issues. The report further explores how the POS system can provide businesses with a competitive edge by optimizing sales processes, reducing data entry, and enabling better resource allocation. It also examines the advantages of a centralized database for efficient data management and recommends telecommunication options like LAN, MAN, and WAN to support the POS system. Finally, the report addresses potential security, privacy, and confidentiality risks associated with the POS system and suggests measures to protect the business against these threats. Desklib offers a platform to access this and similar solved assignments.

it for business
POS System
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Contents
What are the advantages and disadvantages of the new POS system?............................................2
How will this POS system help the business gain competitive advantages?..................................2
What are the advantages of having a centralized database?............................................................3
How could this POS system facilitate decision making?................................................................4
Recommend telecommunication options for this POS system........................................................5
What type of risks does the POS system bring and how to protect the business against the risks? 6
References........................................................................................................................................6

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What are the advantages and disadvantages of the new POS system?
The new POS system is designed with large number of advantages as well as disadvantages. The
new POS system was newly introduced in the year 2008 according to the given case study report.
It aims at assisting the business activities to maintain the records of data related to sales history
and also aims at minimizing the manual work load. The new POS system reduced the work of
cash register. It helps the business activities to function on each units of inventory. It also aims at
offering the business a comprehensive description of the related inventory items which are
bought, used or sold. Some of the items which were rejected was also determined by the new
POS system. Apart from this, it also function as inputting, tracking and distributing data in order
to control and manage all the activities of the business operations. The new POS system also
supports in creating a reliable and accurate counts based on the total units of inventory which
will minimize the estimating on the quantity to order. Thus, an innovative idea of the “real costs”
was introduced by the new POS system which helped the business to save the time (Laudon and
Laudon, 2016).
The major disadvantages of the new POS system is that it minimizes the goals and mission
which are set by the owners because all the activities are dependent on the system instead of
manual work. However, the new POS system costs about £2000 which is really high and costly
for any company to bear it. In addition to this, the new POS system do not provide any security
and sometimes it is very difficult to manage the business activities and its operations. It also
provides the issues related to maintenance along with the training costs and sometimes, the
problems related to power failure may also take place (Özsu and Valduriez, 2011).
How will this POS system help the business gain competitive advantages?
POS system helps every business activities to obtain the competitive advantages. As per the case
study given, POS assist numerous methods to the business and it also offer the business to
minimize the manual work, the detailed knowledge of the product helps the business to know the
actual price of the product Earlier, it happened that the owners of the business used to invest their
time on the planning and managing the business activities and they estimated that they were

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suing some products which were not that profitable as it was actually expected (Stevens, 2013).
So, the new POS system helped the managers to earn more profits and remain competitive in the
market. It helps the managers to gain profit margins either on the temporary basis or on a
permanent basis.
As a result, the managers work more effectively and they aim at generating higher results. The
new POS system helps to process the sales units and reduces the need to data entry which
actually saves time as well. The managers are able to delegate more roles and responsibilities to
their employees and they are able to manage all the operations of the business to remain more
competitive in the existing market (Tsoulos, 2000).
What are the advantages of having a centralized database?
There are huge number of business which focuses on the management information systems as
well as membership databases. Centralized database is well-defined as a particular center where
a user can discover his/her name, address and all the business actions. One of the primary scuffle
is the lack of the centralized database. Generally, it happens that the organization and businesses
uphold distinct databases for membership (Porter, 2011). Events, sales and supplementary
process. There are several advantages of having a centralized database and the databases should
be combined together into single centralized database with having the benefits given below:
 Support: Centralized database aims at supporting on an individual product. When the
company focuses on multiple databases, it becomes very difficult to manage and control
every activities. Individual support is required for individual products (Tukker, 2015).
 Data Integrity: Data integrity is one of the prime advantages of the centralized database.
It helps to avoid the repetition of the data in the whole system. Usually, it happens that
when any business manages and operates multiple database for related segments of
people, then they break the rule. It happens that each member must have unique primary
records with individual contact information so that it becomes easy for the company to
search for any data on an individual platform.
 Important wide marketing knowledge: It is very easy to maintain the reports and manage
all the operations with the help of centralized database system. Whereas in multiple

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platforms, the duplication may take place and the records may be similar to each other
which cannot further be identified as well (Joinson et al., 2010).
How could this POS system facilitate decision making?
POS system helps to take effective decisions which will be very beneficial for all the business
operations to run it very smoothly. POS aims at performing all the activities in a most effective
way as it primarily focuses on the managers and employees who work and manages all the
important information. POS aims at minimizing the manual work because all the necessary
information are managed at individual location which can easily be tracked with the help of
central database (Hall, 2012).
Centralized database manages all the necessary information at an individual location which
reduces the chances of repetition of data. When the records are kept at single place, then it
becomes easy for the company to find any data at the time of urgency. Consequently, the
numbers of sold products and purchased is also maintained by POS system. It helps to compile
the sales history and gain advantages in the whole system. POS aims at offering a wide range id
advantages such as inputting, tracking and distribution of data. However, the managers can take
better decisions with the help of accurate and reliable data (Coronel and Morris, 2016).
Recommend telecommunication options for this POS system.
There are numerous number of telecommunication alternatives which can be widely used for the
new POS system. The additional network allows the computers to communicate and connect
with the other computers by using several medium of communication. Generally, three main
types of network are used such as LAN (Local Area Network), MAN (Metropolitan Area
Network) and WAN (Wide Area Network). These network options operate in many geographical
locations. Primarily, LAN is used in small areas and it aims at covering a specific location.
Similarly, MAN is used in bigger areas and WAN is used as one of the major networks as
compared to LAN and MAN. There are also additional networks which are widely used are
PAN, SAN, EPN and VAN (Latré et al., 2011).

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 LAN stands for Local area network which is usually used inside a building or any
individual organizations. The connections are found at the greater speed and it is cheap
and easily affordable as well (Ramamurthy, 2012).
 MAN stands for Metropolitan area network. It is a larger network and it usually spans
huge buildings in the same town. One of the common example of MAN is IUB networks.
 WAN stands for Wide area network which covers the entire geographical areas such as
internet. It is very costly because it is available at very high speed with a wide range of
networks and locations as well (Pahlavan and Krishnamurthy, 2011).
Some of the cables which are widely used by the wired technologies are Unshielded Twisted Pair
(UTP) Cable, Coaxial Cable, Wireless LANs, Shielded Twisted Pair (STP) Cable, Fibre Optic
Cable and Cable Installation Guides.
In addition to this, wireless technologies which are commonly used are radio receivers, satellite
television, broadcast television, cordless telephones, garage door openers, wireless computer
mice, keyboards and headsets, headphones and GPS units (Baccelli and Błaszczyszyn, 2010).
What type of risks does the POS system bring and how to protect the business against the risks?
The risks involved in the new POS system are mentioned below:
 Security
Security is one of the major risk which is found in new POS system. The data kept are recorded
and it is not easy to maintain all the data in a single platform with a unique code identification.
Hugh alert and security must be done that will prevent the data from hacking. This can easily be
done by hiring technology experts who can solve such risk in the business (Culnan and
Armstrong, 2010).
 Privacy:
Privacy is also a risk in the new POS system. Privacy can be defined as the skill of the person or
a group for stopping then information about oneself that can become known to people than those
whom they given information to. Technology is such a modern thing in today’s world such as

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internet and social media. So unique code must be designed which cannot be easily hacked or
leaked (Bygrave, 2014).
 Confidentiality:
Every document and information in any business must be confidential which cannot be easily be
drawn from unauthorized people. All the data must be recorded in such a manner that it will
maintain the privacy as well as confidentiality.

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References
Baccelli, F. and Błaszczyszyn, B., 2010. Stochastic geometry and wireless networks: Volume II
Applications. Foundations and Trends® in Networking, 4(1–2), pp.1-312.
Bygrave, L.A., 2014. Data privacy law: an international perspective (Vol. 63). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Coronel, C. and Morris, S., 2016. Database systems: design, implementation, & management.
Cengage Learning.
Culnan, M.J. and Armstrong, P.K., 2010. Information privacy concerns, procedural fairness, and
impersonal trust: An empirical investigation. Organization science, 10(1), pp.104-115.
Hall, J.A., 2012. Accounting information systems. Cengage Learning.
Joinson, A.N., Reips, U.D., Buchanan, T. and Schofield, C.B.P., 2010. Privacy, trust, and self-
disclosure online. Human–Computer Interaction, 25(1), pp.1-24.
Latré, B., Braem, B., Moerman, I., Blondia, C. and Demeester, P., 2011. A survey on wireless
body area networks. Wireless Networks, 17(1), pp.1-18.
Laudon, K.C. and Laudon, J.P., 2016. Management information system. Pearson Education
India.
Özsu, M.T. and Valduriez, P., 2011. Principles of distributed database systems. Springer Science
& Business Media.
Pahlavan, K. and Krishnamurthy, P., 2011. Principles of wireless networks: A unified approach.
Prentice Hall PTR.
Porter, M.E., 2011. Competitive advantage of nations: creating and sustaining superior
performance (Vol. 2). Simon and Schuster.
Ramamurthy, B., 2012. Design of optical WDM networks: LAN, MAN and WAN architectures
(Vol. 603). Springer Science & Business Media.
Stevens, D., 2013. Personal business service system and method. U.S. Patent 8,494,878.

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Tsoulos, G.V., 2000. Adaptive antennas for wireless communications. Wiley-IEEE Press.
Tukker, A., 2015. Product services for a resource-efficient and circular economy–a review.
Journal of cleaner production, 97, pp.76-91.