Background of Coca Cola Company
Information System management is the technological form of handling database regarding financial information. It is computerised and programmed in a manner so that every operation and transaction in the organization is reported in specific databases. The information system is programmed in such ways that even special reports appear at will from the software (Vibhor, Mehta and Karandikar 2015). This system provides actual information about an organization therefore; it helps in the generation of feedback reports for managers in the organization. This feedback could again, be checked by the higher managerial authorities to assess the performance of the organization under the managers appointed. The Information System management depicts the real data about a company rather than the predicted data that is proposed at the start of every business year. Therefore, this system calculates the achievements of an organization against its set goals. The necessity of having an automated Information Management System in an organization is thus increasing exponentially every passing day. The following report would be an analysis of the Information Management System of the Coca Cola Company functioning in the United Kingdom. This analysis would include the background study of the company, the current strategic goals and challenges for the organization and the information about the ranges of information systems are currently being used by the organization. The report would further include the use of the information system synchronizing to the current situation of the business in Coca Cola, the strengths and weaknesses of the system in maintaining agility and decision-making and the people and the processes that are responsible in improving the analysed system.
Information about the organisation
Dr. John Pemberton first established the Coca Cola Company in the year 1886 (The Coca-Cola Company 2018). The company had been incepted in the town of Atlanta in Georgia with the formula of the beverage developed by Dr. Pemberton with ingredients extracted from coca plant and kola nut. Although, initially the beverage was developed as a tonic to cure headaches, carbonated water was later added to it. It was found that the people who tasted it appreciated the evolved concoction better. Therefore, it started production of aerated drinks as its primary product. In addition, the company started producing other flavoured aerated drinks as well; however, the original carbonated water remains the most popular until date. The sales figures utter that the organization has released 3,300 products over 220 countries spanning the entire globe (The Coca-Cola Company 2018). The organization has been effectively serving the countries comprising of Eurasia, Africa, the number of employees serving people worldwide through this organization has amounted to the number of 92,800 (Rouhani and Mehri 2018). Information about the company comprising of the regular transactions and the employee minutes are recorded with precision in the company. The company has an effective Information Flow that includes crucial data, information system and knowledge access from the highest to the lowest authority. Information System Management serves as the backbone of the Coca Cola Company, which serves to its success (The Coca-Cola Company 2018). In the Coca Cola Company, the information management is regarded as one of the biggest assets in the organization. Therefore, the measures taken to manage even the minute amount of information about every transaction and information in the industry are taken utmost care to maintain privacy.
Current Strategic Goals and Challenges
The current strategic goals and challenges for the organisation
The global business structure is ever changing since the time of its inception. There has been no company thriving without a proper strategic information management system. The Coca Cola Company is arguably the most influential and by far the biggest beverage company in the entire world (Robinson et al. 2014). Therefore, it is quite natural that it would implement the best strategy in implementing information system in the organization in such a way that the organization maintains its pioneer position. The times when Coca Cola had first strategized to implement the information system in, it faced challenges due to the information system module used and other factors that could influence the company outcomes.
Initially, the Coca Cola Company had an information management system called the legacy system to manage all the system managerial information in the organization. However, as days passed, it was found that the legacy system was quite old and progressively incompetent. The system was found out be having an inefficient User Interface and needed a huge amount of maintenance (Nwankpa 2015). This is where the company faced a big challenge, as it demanded huge company economy to maintain the system. Previously, the company even used to note down their financial data over spreadsheets manually. The results were submitted as a hard copy. It is not difficult to understand that the information system management was difficult and time consuming. Again, there was a huge chance of data mismanagement since everything was recorded in hard copies. The Coca Cola Company started growing globally as a brand with huge number of customer base. However, with the passing times, technology began to evolve globally compelling the use of digital systems, internet and even cloud computing (Vlasov et al. 2017). The latest technology implemented the idea of digitalizing business systems and replacing hard copies with computerized results, which would save time, space and money. In addition, it began to increase the number of products it did before and the workforce increased exponentially with several factories and setups worldwide. This called for a huge incoming of information every passing time in the organization. This became a challenge in the strategic implementation of business information management in the organization.
Information about the range of systems that are currently in use by the organization
The technological range seemed to expand with the passing time and this demanded that the Coca Cola Company increased their level of information management system. This is why; the company introduced the idea of installing the latest information management system, called the Strategic Enterprise Management or the SEM (Laudon and Laudon 2016). The system provided the Coca Cola Company to plan their business strategies in accordance to the finances, data warehousing to collect the information of factories and analysing the acquired data. This also enabled the company to forecast on the financial reports and collect data of the employees to calculate their daily wages. The monthly sales forecast could be calculated due to this information system management tool. With the help of this tool, the Coca Cola Company was able to implement the Strategic Information System. This further aided the company to manage the flow of information through the entire organizational structure, irrespective of the global area. The Coca Cola Company could now use these information in strategizing the company’s future prospects and decisions. These strategies increased the company’s position in a huge way rather than just fulfilling the immediate goals of either maximising profit or reducing the enterprise costs.
Range of Information Systems Used
Use of information systems to the business situation
An organization is not only built on product and employee evaluation but also the production, distribution and development of the manufactured products as well. The Coca Cola Company has thus induced the origin of a new operating framework called the Coca Cola Enterprise or the CCE that has helped the organization into expanding the territories of the iconic beverage company. It has helped the Coca Cola Company is extending the products to Norway, Sweden, Great Britain, Luxemburg, France and many more areas. This new system has enabled the organization into developing an entire new zone and business situation of logistics control. This situation was implemented and new in the organization. It would solve the supply chain management problems of the organization in all of the United Kingdom for the organization (Nwankpa and Roumani 2014). This information management system called Systems Applications Program or SAP enabled the Coca Cola Company to transform its business and to enable CCE’s latest operations every day in a systematic and harmonious way. This included every information control of the system from financial transactions to manufacturing, processing, workforce, procurement and other processes that are related to the CCE department of the Coca Cola Company (Koch and Mitteregger 2016). It allows CCE to shorten the time cycle in all these processes and increase productivity. Therefore, this information system accelerates productivity being inversely proportional to the time. It helped the Coca Cola Company in maintaining their cost and quality equation, bringing improved visibility to the process and effectively implementing the decision-making power of the organization.
Strengths of the systems in enhancing decision-making
Information System management has been through a lot of changes in the past years. It has witnessed expansions on several levels. It has transformed from tradition systems of accounting to SAP generated Enterprise Resource Planning systems. These complex systems are covering the entire business process for the Coca Cola Company. The Coca Cola Company, being a large enterprise, relies on the ERP systems for handling its information system. Thus, it is important to increase the automation of business processes and integration for the Coca Cola Company with the implementation of the ERP systems for information system management (Junnarkar and Verma 2016). Therefore, investment in information system is domineering if the top management of the company is to maintain its existing market position, just like the Coca Cola Company had retained its position at the top amongst all the beverage companies ever since the time it had been established.
Strengths and Weaknesses of the System
The advantages the ERP system have over other business information systems is that the other business information systems tend to pass themselves ass ERP systems compared to the market right ERP solutions such as the SAP and the Oracle solutions (Grube and Wynn 2018). This is where the Coca Cola Company has an advantage over all the other competitors since they have the market right ERP system to manage their information system. In this way, it creates confusion in the software market. Certainly ERP systems have a history of about 40 years in the global market of information systems and the model versioning like, the launch of new version with enhanced functionality, create a dominant position in the market.
Weaknesses and vulnerabilities of current systems
It is a known fact that in the recent years the ERP systems have soared and developed significantly. The Coca Cola Company relies its entire information management system on the ERP. It is primarily because the functions of an ERP system is so manifold that it has reduced the tendency for the Coca Cola Company into implementing numerous software. Instead the ERP system has compacted the technique of various other software into one (Gartner and Krichbaum 2014). It serves the purpose for managing the information system of the entire organization. However, like any other software system that covers this large spectrum of access and usability, there are some weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the ERP systems as well. The weaknesses and the vulnerabilities that the ERP system possesses are listed as below:
Delay in updating: Like the other 87 percent of the organizations in the entire world, the Coca Cola Company also faces problems due to the outdated ERP systems that computers feature (Dwivedi and Sharma 2016). If the available version is currently unsupported, it faces difficulty to rectify any issues, crashes and becomes vulnerable to risk. In the ever growing world of cybercrime, this forms a greater chance for hackers to get through these information systems.
Inadequate employee training: The Coca Cola Company are employing humongous amount of employees every day. It is certainly worth considering the security risk posed by internal sources in more detail (Dolan 2015). The lack of understanding the entire ERP system in the old and the new employees altogether is what causing trouble in handling the information system in the Coca Cola Company.
Use of unauthorized systems: Frankensteining is a phenomena that occurs if multiple software programs simultaneously be used to accomplish a goal. This could be as maintaining sales data on an ERP (Aslan, Stevenson and Hendry 2015). However, the running reports use the functionality of Excel. If this business practise is followed in the Coca Cola Company, beyond the office protocol, it could mean that the data could exist within a number of different programs at the same time, where it may or may not be maintained properly, or is not secured enough from hacking.
People and Processes Responsible for Improving the Analyzed System
People and processes associated with managing and improving information system
The information system in the Coca Cola Company may be automated, but ultimately it is to be handled by the workforce in the company (Ali and Miller 2017). The people managing the software need to be organized and trained since this system would keep on updating with the advancement in technologies. The cyberworld is becoming more complex and so is the ERP system (Lim 2014). With the new era of people trying to hack into information systems to breach out confidential information is gaining in volume day by day. The people and the process associated with these systems thus needs to be more and more agile with the software lessening the chances of information breach.
The following report that was made on the information management system of the Coca Cola Company protruded that the organization uses the agile ERP system nowadays to manage their information system. Organizations have nowadays understood the benefits of having an ERP system (Kulkarni et al. 2015). Although, an ERP implementation has several surfaces and if it fails to be executed properly, it could result in a business disaster instead of being an advantage to the organization. Therefore it is recommended that, the executive management should always be closely associated with an ERP implementation. A top-down approach is supposed to ensure a successful ERP implementation in this regard (Vlasov et al. 2017). Implementing an ERP process in a manufacturing organization, like the manufacturer of beverages as the Coca Cola Company, it is required to understand the customer base primarily. To overcome this, it is important that the customer understand the product first, therefore product recognition and buy-in option implementation is absolutely necessary. For a successful implementation of ERP system in any organization and running it even smoothly, instead of totally customizing or localizing an ERP system, it is more preferable to do a little bit of business reengineering. Therefore, remodelling the business structure according to the ERP system would be more feasible for the Coca Cola Company to flourish more in the UK with smooth business operations.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it can be said that the Coca Cola Company has been trying to implement the information system management since its inception implementing the primitive ways and slowly progressing into the implementation of a successful ERP system in the UK. Initially, the Coca Cola Company had an information management system called the legacy system to manage all the system managerial information in the organization. However, as days passed, it was found that the legacy system was quite old and progressively incompetent. It was later in time that the company introduced the idea of installing the latest information management system, called the Strategic Enterprise Management or the SEM. The system provided the Coca Cola Company to plan their business strategies in accordance to the finances, data warehousing to collect the information of factories and analysing the acquired data. This also enabled the company to forecast on the financial reports and collect data of the employees to calculate their daily wages. Further progression in business and proving to be the best selling beverage in the world, the Coca Cola Company induced the origin of a new operating framework called the Coca Cola Enterprise or the CCE that has helped the organization into expanding the territories of the iconic beverage company. This made the company adapt the latest technology of information management called the ERP system that helped in accessing and managing the manifold systems that generate pile loads of information within seconds and handle them at ease. However, these systems, being enormous in functions and utility, has its weaknesses and vulnerabilities, which could be eliminated if the recommendations could be followed.
References
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