Introduction and Background Briefing
Background Information
Grow Your Business is a company that produces foods that are organically certified. John is the owner of the business. At its infancy, it made use of John’s backyard and unused land of the neighbours. The vegetables produced are of high quality because organic fertilizer is used over artificial fertilizer or pesticides to boost its growth. The organic fertilizer is acquired from John’s cows and chicken. Companion planting is practiced to prevent crops from being attacked by insects. Besides, different crops are cycled from year to year to sustain soil health. The produce is not sold in the local vegetable market, rather, customers come to buy them in the farm. In the recent years, the business outlook has grown considerably after John returned to the property of his family that was originally utilized as a dairy farm. He has transformed the pasture land into a garden of vegetables.
Grow Your Business has several workers. John who is the owner of the business attend to all harvesting and production aspects. His wife Jane is in charge of all aspects of handling clients, their payments, their orders and their order pick-ups. The number of individuals working in the company has increased significantly. Christina, Charlie, Chris and Cathy deal with customers. They take orders from clients by phone and report orders directly to Jane. They also help with gardening activities. Marsha and Mark handle the pick-up services.
Customers are now not coming to pick up their orders, unless particularly pre-arranged, rather their orders are delivered to their homes. Dirk act as an assistant to Marsha and Mark to carry out sorting of the produce boxes of customers and do some of the heavy lifting. Tina and terry are both experienced at managing different machinery and vehicles used on the farm. They report to Tim who manages all farm machinery and tractors. Tim report to Jane on matters regarding to clients, delivery and order issues, and to John on all aspects of production. Samantha and Sam handle account aspects and also report directly to Jane. Noeletta, Netta, Noel and Nick offer assistance on the production aspects. They all report directly to John. Their particular work is to help in all manner of gardening such as planting, fertilizers, pruning, weeding, watering and picking.
Figure 1: Farm Organization Structure
The volume and range of produce and the increased number of clients has resulted to challenges of keeping track of things. As such, an information system may offer a way to assist in managing the growing complexities of business. The new information system will handle the following functions:
Keeping and tracking orders: customers order their produce by phone a day before collection and John works through a long vegetable list. It takes longer than expected since John goes through the list from the beginning to the end, although there are certain goods that different customers never purchase (Tripathi and Mishra, 2014. P. 213). John chats with every client and it is time consuming and sometimes depriving him from attending to his fields. Many clients wish to have an easier and quicker method of making orders.
Top Dollar
Facilitating correct packaging of orders for home delivery: customers drop to pick up their orders on a weekly basis. There were no challenges in the early days before expansion of the business. However, things have intensified in the past few years. The produce has gained demand and popularity causing crowdedness at the area of pick-up (Shah, 2011, p. 51). Quarrels have ruptured over confusion on which customer to take which box of vegetable produce. A customer home delivery services should therefore be considered.
Managing customer information: the customer’s personal information such as their phone numbers, names and address are recorded in a customer book. Some practices of business that deal with clients require documentation to allow standardization, and changed to be more effective for customers and the farm (Suraj Nandiganahalli, Kwon and Hwang, 2018). An Information system is needed to handle the client base, their bills and orders. It will assist in easing their business operations.
Inventory management: The produce available weekly depend on harvest readiness and weather. At times there are confusion about what available and what is not and as such, customers feel disappointed when they come for their orders because sometimes they receive the unexpected (Ainin et al., 2015, p. 9). Besides, there are confusion about which customers has partially payed, not payed or payed. As the business grew, there were some noticeable inconsistencies evolving in processes of payments, sometimes by credit and other times in cash.
Inventory management system will manage all the business stock items and inventory. It is a database for administering and storing all kinds of data needed for accurate and efficient warehouse inventory management (Thöle, Richter and Ehlert, 2013, 443). It may include fields or modules for monitoring locations and all items, back orders, reorder points, inventory error tracking, requisitions, lead times, among others. Inventory management system may interface with other applications including ERP.
An inventory management system will assist Grow Your Business to be more organized. Without managing and tracking the inventory, it is challenging to determine what is needed, when it is needed and the quantity required (Wedderburn and Rickenbach, 2011). With an inventory management system, the business will have comprehensive records of each business asset. Besides, an inventory management system increases transparency and tracking. With all property consistently being monitored, one can examine the weaknesses and strengths of the business. In addition, it is easy to determine where the business inventory is and its worth.
An order tracking system will permit clients to monitor their orders, from the time an order is made to its delivery. The customer will be able to know whether his or her order has been filled, whether it is correct, whether there are items missing, or when it will be delivered (Ayanso and Lertwachara, 2015, p. 78). For customers to gain knowledge about their orders, they need visibility across systems and processes. Therefore, the order tracking system will need to offer knowledge about order status through the whole journey to the client, from making order to filling it in the warehouse and to logistics where the order will be acquired and taken to the carrier.
The Produce Pick Up
The order tracking system will be connected with other fulfilment and management systems such as warehouse management, carrier’s back-end tracking system, sales order management and inventory. Connecting these systems permit the order tracking system to offer the visibility into order location and status (Haji, Afzalabadi and Haji, 2018, p. 318). An order tracking system is essential since it is a major component of the overall experience of the customer.
CIS is an open system that handles the entire communication of a firm with its clients. The client system will be able to gather any details about clients, their functions toward the business and must efficiently communicate with clients using channels of communication such as email, SMS, web and voice services (Sanglee Cho, 2011). Customer information system includes several functions of customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
Figure 2: Customer Information System
(Sources: Janssens, 2011, p. 2310)
Task of the customer system include:
- Gathering identities of consumers
- Additional sales management
- Communication management
- Profiling
- Service operations management.
Grow Your Business need to develop good farming practice codes. As such, production system, diversifying market system and sustainable agricultural production standards systems need implementation of more detailed strategies of management. These strategies should be flexible and simple to adapt to the changing environmental or economic conditions and they require evidence of their compliance (Jiang, Zuo and Zhang, 2013). Besides, the need for data about the processes of production is increasing, both from aspect of traceability (value-added chains) and regional shareholders to accomplish multi-operational goals by farming. An essential requirement for Grow Your Business to adhere to these various needs is to easily have timely and sufficient data available for offering documentary proof or decision making. The quick evolution of technologies for communication and information, new sensors and massive potentials for offering geo-referenced information (online sensors, remote-sensing, public databases, among others) also allows Grow Your Business to access high quality and ne information and apply them as particular data in process documentation or decision making (Jongoh, 2010, p. 162). With automated information acquisition and managing a farm management information system, Grow Your Business can be seen to adhere to the rapidly increasing standards need in the production processes management.
Grow Your Business will practice precision farming (PF). PF utilizes emerging technologies in information management and handling, and in handling temporal and spatial variability found in all farms. Such use of accurate data minimizes environmental effect and boost economic returns. Comprehensive data is needed in precision farming and is historically connected to particular activities within different site on the field (Kang, Hahn and De, 2017). Site-specific farming does not precision farming. The application of methods and techniques that make precision farming can offer a wealth of tools and information to apply and manage information appropriately for Grow Your Business. The data-driven strategy can be applied to assist in improving strategies of crop management and evidence of compliance via documentation (Mohammadhossein et al., 2014, p. 24).
The initiation of new ICT (information and communication technology) technologies in Grow Your Business will be a substantial advancement in all undertakings for measurements oriented payments within the programs of agro-environment and associated efforts to administer environmentally effectual systems in land utilization (Khodakarami and Chan, 2014, p. 35). Besides, crop products of Grow Your Business entering the food chain must demonstrate certified source through accepted strategy of management. Therefore, there is need for an integration of information system to advise directors of recommended guidelines, formal recommendation and implications associated with various scenarios at decision making point during crop cycle.
It can be brought to a successful conclusion by incorporating real-time modelling (a development model and crop growth connected to sensors within the canopy of growth), with intelligent systems that have been set up with instructions from a recommended strategy of management such as organic, ICM (integrated crop management), factored risk, and legal instruction such as safety, health and environmental protection (May, Atkinson and Ferrer, 2017, p. 68). It will largely assist the farm manager to make sound decisions. Knowledge of the expert in expert systems and models form can be written down and posted in web services or a device readable form on the internet to be actively bound into the software of the consumer. As the required information of Grow Your Business is already in the suggested information system, certification of cross compliance and crop province of accepted standards can be created easily.
Besides, Grow Your Business crop products can remain in the farm. Apart from the use of animal feeds to boost growth, the company will use bio-energy or bio-fuels. It will assist in improving the likelihood of advancing to a highly energy-neutral and energy-efficient farm. It is supported by the substantial decrease of energy needed by small smart machines that operate independently focusing on inputs. The system vision document tried to concentrate on the balance of opportunities in technologies put together with socioeconomic and environmental needs with the major role of information management (Lin, 2010). Intensive application of knowledge and information will be a significant activity of Grow Your Business in future.
References
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Ainin, S., Akma Mohd Salleh, N., Bahri, S. and Mohd Faziharudean, T. (2015). Organization’s Performance, Customer Value and the Functional Capabilities of Information Systems. Information Systems Management, 32(1), pp.2-14.
Al-Masree, H. (2015). Extracting Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) From Relational Database Schem. International Journal of Database Theory and Application, 8(3), pp.15-26.
Ayanso, A. and Lertwachara, K. (2015). Analyzing Customer Service Technologies for Online Retailing: A Customer Service Life Cycle Approach. Journal of Computer Information Systems, 55(4), pp.73-80.
Brearcliffe, D. (2012). Network Entity Relationship Diagrams. SSRN Electronic Journal.
Giraudeau, M. (2017). The farm as an accounting laboratory: an essay on the history of accounting and agriculture. Accounting History Review, 27(2), pp.201-215.
Gnip, P. and Charvát, K. (2012). Management of zones in precision farming. Agricultural Economics (Zem?d?lská ekonomika), 49(No. 9), pp.416-418.
Gnip, P. and Kafka, S. (2012). Using technology of data collection and data processing in precision farming. Agricultural Economics (Zem?d?lská ekonomika), 49(No. 9), pp.419-426.
Grace, R. and Bruderlein, C. (2012). Building Effective Monitoring, Reporting, and Fact-Finding Mechanisms. SSRN Electronic Journal.
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