Benefits of Point of Sale Systems
Disucss about the POS System.
To gain the competitive advantage for any business they should adopt hi-tech technology. Point of sale is one such technology that helps in smoothing the operations by making the work easy (Cummins & Cummins, 2018). It helps in analysing the businesses in a better way. The report is based on the case study of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery Company that gains competitive advantage by using point of sale system (Fleyder, Kerner, Rabinovich, Salinas, Ben-Porat & Frank, 2018). It helps in gaining making decisions by analysing the sales and transactions effectively. This report covers various security issues along with the telecommunication media that exist in POS system.
Point of sale system has helped businesses to increasing their efficiency but it offers various advantages and disadvantages that have been discussed below.
Advantage
- Point of sale system enhances the efficiency of an organisation by recording all the transaction related to sale (Sidlo, Kovacs, Brock, O’keefe, Humpherys, Whiddett & Kurani, 2017). The traditional method use to make use of manual method which has been replaced by automatic report generation.
- The result gained through point of sale system is more accurate and also makes the work easier for employees as it is generally done automatically (Sidlo, Kovacs, Brock, O’keefe, Humpherys, Whiddett & Kurani, 2017).
- The profit margins and revenues are calculated automatically which has eliminated manual efforts.
- Point of sale system helps to keep track of all the stocks so that it could be managed easily
- Deployment of system is easy.
Disadvantages
- With the use of system regularly the maintenance cost also increases.
- Point of sale system is prone to cyber-attacks also as most of the data is stored online which increases the chances of data leakage (Sidlo, Kovacs, Brock, O’keefe, Humpherys, Whiddett & Kurani, 2017).
- It requires an internet connection to make the system assessable to end user.
Point of sale offers various advantages in the business environment. The competitive advantages help in enhancing the efficiency of a business. The make use of effective technology which in turn improves the efficiency of an organisation. The make use of IT activities to get the knowledge about the target market. It helps in reducing the work load of the organisation so that focus could be made on the profit margin. It helps in maintain the records easily and on time. It also enhances customer’s experiences as they do not need to wait longer. The company make use of ERP activities so that they work effectively. Point of sale system processes activities to support the organisation.
In the case study of four seasons’ greenhouse and nursery the use of centralized database has offered various advantages.
- As there is single area where attacks can be possible, in this manner the chances for the framework to get hacked diminishes as it is troublesome for the hackers to break the framework in which all data is put away (Coles-Kemp, Reddington & Williams, 2011).
- While settling on a critical choice, data can be effectively benefited from the framework. The best component of incorporated framework is the organization can accessing the data from a single location rather than multiple servers.
- It is fast as compared to distributed database.
- The process is cost effective as it’s requires less assets and give more abilities to users (Coles-Kemp, Reddington & Williams, 2011).
- Changing the procedure and dealing with the information turns to be easy.
Information gained through point of sale system helps in making decisions. The data analysed through point of sale system helps in making efficient decisions. To attract the target market highly data drive approach is used. It also helps the company to know the loop holes in the system so that plans could be designed accordingly. This also helps in knowing the competitors in the market so that sales could be managed (Tsuchida & Oishi, 2017). The POS framework encourages the basic leadership process by giving careful and exact information to the organization and coordinating different capacities in order to accomplish the fulfilment level of the clients. The choice of the organization turns out to be more adjusted with the presentation of this framework.
Centralized Database Advantages
Point of sale system helps in tracking the information to find out the actual information. This procedure requires time; in this way it is not recommended to be used in modern businesses. Likewise, if the employees track the data utilizing the manual technique it might lead to make wrong choices (Yu, Wang, Liu & Dou, 2018). Consequently, it should be noticed that under this procedure the representatives need to put full endeavours to accomplish the data that too not exact. The manual method is not quick as well as accurate.
It resolves all the queries related to sales and transactions in the system. It can also help in finding the target market and the sale of product. Then analyses are done of information stored so that accurate decisions could be done (Breithaupt, 2010). In case study of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery is used to decide which stock need to be enhanced and which stock need to be decreased. Point of sale helps in setting priority of services.
Information could be tracked manually but it requires lot of human efforts as well as time. Thus it is recommended to use point of sale system.
The information stored on point of sale system is important thus it should be secured. Point of sale system stores information related to all the clients, sales and transaction so that expenses could be analysed. This helps in managing the business efficiently by analysing the sale. It helps the company to find the errors in the operations so that they run effectively. It helps in highlighting those areas in which more focus is required to enhance the profit. Some recovery strategies are also discovered so that at time of failure some techniques could be adopted.
To assure that company attains market growth the innovation of telecommunication media is used. There are many telecommunication media that are available that helps an organisation to meet the necessities (Trott & Hoecht, 2014). Some of the advanced type of network and media that are available are discussed below.
There are various type of network that are available that could be used in an organisation. From all the available option LAN is mostly used even in the case study of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery Company. The use of LAN offers many benefits to an organisation especially its high speed and cost effective. For small business it is recommended to use LAN has it is cost effective (Trott & Hoecht, 2014). It connects all the computers in nearby are and the speed is also high as compared to other telecommunication network.
Data Analysis for Decision Making
If the company has single store than wired technology could be used otherwise wireless technology need to be used. Wired technology is hard to implement but maintenance is easy. There are fewer chances of attacks as compared to wireless network. The wireless network has high speed of connection and there are less chances of data breach (Fischer, Maggi & Rammer, 2012). Wired technology helps the business to attain profit at low costs.
In case of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery Company there are various risk that are associated with point of sale system. Some of the risks associated with the system have been discussed below (Silverbrook, 2017). It is important to resolve all the risk associated in an organisation so that they could work effectively.
- Security- Point of sale system stores complete information about an organisation. Thus it is the liability of owners to secure the data so that only authorised users can access the data. The security of system is important to assure that hackers do not attack the system and read the sensitive data (Silverbrook, 2017).
- Privacy- As most of the data is stored among clouds these days. Hence, it is necessary for a company to assure that sensitive data would not be leaked and only valid user will be able to access the data (Antonucci, 2017). Hackers are increasing day by day thus proper techniques need to be undertaken.
- Confidentiality- Most of the payment in an organisation is done by online methods. Thus it is important for point of sale system to provide appropriate access control so that only authorised user can access the data (Wolfe, Romanelli, Sanjay & Kelly, 2018).
Conclusion
It can be concluded from this report that point of sale system is beneficial for business. The advantages and disadvantages of point of sale system have been discussed. The case study of Four Seasons Greenhouse and Nursery Company has been analysed and then it is stated that POS system helps in gaining competitive advantage. The benefits of using centralized database have been listed. In this report various telecommunication media and network that can be used in an organisation has been discussed. Apart from that the risk associated with point of sale system and their mitigation measures has been discussed.
References
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