Pros and cons of POS system
Discuss about the advantages and disadvantages of the system and various communication channels that are used in the POS system.
It is necessary for an organisation to chick that they are working on an updated technology as it is the world where businesses are completely dependent on the technology. Point of sale is one such technology that helps in monitoring the sales and all the transactions in an organisation. This report comprises of the advantages and disadvantages of the system and various communication channels that are used in the POS system have been discussed.
There are various advantages and disadvantages that are offered by POS system.
Advantages
- It store all the data related to sales and transactions on the real time approach.
- It provide alerts to users regarding all the sales transaction made, which in turns enhances the customer relationship management (Kenrick and Jabri, 2018).
- It plays an important role while making decisions as information is received at anytime and anywhere.
- It makes sure that there are no errors caused due to humans and quick services are provided to end users (Kenrick and Jabri, 2018).
- It also make sure that problem of data redundancy is resolved.
- It adds transparency to the work process as all the sales information is shared instantly.
Disadvantages
- Point of sale system offers various issues due to the loss of security and privacy of data.
- An IT expert is required for maintenance of point of sale system (McCarthy, 2018).
- It may lead to loss of data if system get corrupted as there is no backup plans designed thus it is not proven to be good for an effective business environment (McCarthy, 2018).
Point of sale system offers various benefits to the business. It helps in making the process easy by removing the manual analyses of data. It offers the competitive advantage as it helps in making decisions for betterment of a business. The data captured through the analyses of point of sale helps in understanding the business in a better way. It helps in knowing which products and services are offering better profit and which are not (Weber and Bailey, 2016). So, that decision could be taken accordingly. The analyses help the firm in focusing on the sale of product that is offering greater profit. The data analysed through point of sale is also used in making efficient strategies. Point of sale also helps in improving the process of businesses like accounting skills, decision making process and management of processes regarding the sale.
In case of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery, point of sale system offers competitive advantage by speeding up the all process in a business that is needed to capture more customers. The data that is gathered through POS helps in enhancing the customer satisfaction as it provides detail knowledge of all the sales and purchases. It also helps in resolving customers query as detail description is provided regarding the sales (Redmond, Huang and Heisinger, 2012). It also removes the errors that might occur if work is done manually. It helps in gaining competitive advantage as it faces the future demands of the market.
In an organisation database plays a very essential role as it helps in making decisions for better growth of a firm (Mahajan and Patil,2016). There are many users that more in collaboration thus there arises a need of having a centralised database system. Some of the advantages are:
- It reduces the chances of malicious attacks as the place at which attack could happen is only one.
- Retrieving of data through centralised system is easy as compared to distributed database system as data is stored at one location.
- Portability of data is simple (Samek & Hernandez, 2013).
- It is easy to manage the data as when make changes information need to be modified at single location rather than updating ta different locations.
- It requires comparatively lesser resources which makes the system cost effective.
Advantages offered by point of sale system
One of the sole benefits of using point of sale system is that it helps in making productive and realistic decisions for a firm. In case of four season greenhouse and nursery huge amount of data stored that facilities the decision making task. This helps the business to achieve good growth. Point of sale system makes sure that accurateness of data is maintained (Samek & Hernandez, 2013). In case of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery, Point of sale system also facilities data driven approach which supports the firm to analysis the operations and make accurate decisions. It also helps the business to make proper decisions at time of failure so that proper conclusions can be figured.
Earlier all the process in an organisation used to be done manually that used to be a time taking process. All the tasks done using manual methods take lot of time which has been overcome by point of sale system (Xian, et. al, 2013). There are very less chances that result is accurate through manual methods which is solves by the process of POS. It also eliminates the problem of data redundancy and the transaction could also be tracked at anytime from anywhere. Point of sale system also helps in finding out the best seller in the market and the products through which firms get benefits.
The effectiveness of tracking the data through manual method decreases with time as the data increases. Tracking the data through manual method is a slow process and it does not fit the expectation of modern business (Kim, Lim and Oh, 2016). In manual methods that are chances of data redundancy thus there are chances of making wrong decisions. It requires lot of human efforts to track the information. Tracking of data through manual process do not helps in making instant decisions and also do not give surety on accuracy of data.
Pos system helps in answering variety of questions that are related to sales and transactions in an organisation. It helps in answering the queries regarding the product that are offering greater benefits and also helps the business to know which services need to be increased to boost up the sale.
The information that is captured via POS system is used in future for making decisions regarding the sale in an organisation. The data gathered helps in removing all the inefficient operations from the business.
There are various telecommunication networks that are available in POS system communicate.
Advantages of centralised database
There are various networks available but in case of point of sale system, LAN is recommended. Local area network is better as it is used to connect all the nearby computer devices and have a very high speed of connectivity (Cunningham, et. al, 2015).
Selection of type of telecommunication media is an important part as media decides the performance of the network. The system in an organisation can be connected through a wired technology or a wireless technology(Mahajan, 2016). If the distance between the systems in an organisation is less than they should be connected through wired media as they are easy to maintain, have high speed of connection and there are poor chances of data leakage.
The use of point of sale system has various risks associated with it. There are some common risks that are faced by the system are:
Security- Point of sale system makes huge amount of data available instantly and there are chances of data packets going in wrong hands, thus it could lead to security failure. It is important to protect eh data packets of an organisation to maintain the reputation in the market (Della , Iavazzi and D’Andrea, 2015).
Confidentiality- The confidentiality of data is important for an organisation to maintain the performance. There are chances that data is leaked to some unauthorised user which violets the confidentiality and integrity of data packets. In such cases data need to be encrypted (Carvalho and Dimmick, 2016).
Privacy- privacy of point of sale system needs to be strong by offering proper access control to user regarding who can read and modify the data. Privacy associated with stakeholder’s data needs to be sustained and proper use of firewalls can be highly beneficial in this regards
Conclusion
It can be concluded that point of sale system offers huge importance for the businesses. In this report various advantages and disadvantages has been discussed. The importance of using centralised database has also been analysed. It can be stated that point of sale system helps in making decisions by removing the chances of data redundancy. Various telecommunication technologies have been discussed and the best type of network and media has been suggested that should be used by a business. Other than that point of sae system also offers various risks in terms of security, privacy and confidential as also been discussed in this report
References
Carvalho, K. and Dimmick, J., Visa International Service Association, (2016). Point of sale payment using mobile device and checkout credentials. U.S. Patent Application 15/143,231.
Cunningham, C., Good, T., Kearney, S.P., Miraglia, M., Amundsen, T., Giordano, P., Wang, Y.P. and Zhu, X., Metrologic Instruments Inc, (2015). Point of sale (POS) based checkout system supporting a customer-transparent two-factor authentication process during product checkout operations. U.S. Patent 8,976,030.
Della Corte, V., Iavazzi, A. and D’Andrea, C., (2015). Customer involvement through social media: the cases of some telecommunication firms. Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, 1(1), p.10.
Kenrick, B. and Jabri, M.A., Onmobile Global Ltd, (2018). Method and apparatus for providing interactive media during communication in channel-based media telecommunication protocols. U.S. Patent 9,883,028.
Kim, J.S., Lim, S.S. and Oh, J.W., Pantech Co Ltd, (2016). Method for displaying transmission status of MMS (multimedia messaging service) message and telecommunication terminal using the method. U.S. Patent 9,357,363.
Mahajan, M. and Patil, S., (2016). Optimization of Association Rule in Horizontally Distributed Databases: A new way to strengthen the security of Encrypted Data. Optimization, 2(1).
Mahajan, M., (2016). Optimization of Association Rule in Horizontally Distributed Database using Unique Key Value A New Way to Strengthen The Security of Encrypted Data.
McCarthy, M., (2018) The benefits of Moving to a Point-of-sale (POS) System. [Online] Available at: https://www.allbusiness.com/the-benefits-of-moving-to-a-point-of-sale-pos-system-10206841-1.html. [Accessed on 14th May 2018].
Redmond, E., Huang, J., & Heisinger, P. (2012). U.S. Patent No. 8,190,530. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Samek, J., & Hernandez, M. (2013). U.S. Patent No. 8,550,335. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Weber, L. and Bailey, K., Visa International Service Association (2016). Dynamic point of sale system integrated with reader device. U.S. Patent 9,390,412.
Xian, T., Ellis, D., Good, T., & Zhu, X. (2013). U.S. Patent No. 8,448,863. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
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