Advantages and disadvantages of the new POS system
Discuss about the benefits and cons of having POS system along with the competitive advantages.
The new POS system was designed in the year 2008 which has several pros and cons for the overall activities of the business. The new POS system has created a digital platform for the business which has helped to reduce the manual work and increase the efficiency of the work. In addition to this, new POS system also helps in taking better decisions at the managerial level.
The new POS system was introduced in the year 2008. There are numerous advantages and disadvantages of the new POS system. According to the case study which was mentioned earlier, the advantages of the new POS system is shown below:
- The system helps to offer the deep knowledge and information of those products which has been procured, rejected or sold. This helps to keep the eyes on all the activities and make more profits.
- The manual work related to the business has been reduced because of the introduction of new POS system. It also offers the functions related to inputting, tracking and allocation of data in order to manage all the activities of the business.
- New POS system helps to maintain the accuracy and reliability. It gives the accurate information of the inventory units and sales related activities.
- Decisions are taken more wisely and they are no longer based on speculation of the inventory units rather than everything is entered on the system.
- New POS system helps the business to keep the track of all the data in a system which includes sales contracts and sales history as well. It automatically reduces the work related to cash register (Coffing and Bonfiglio, 2017).
In addition to this, the disadvantages of new POS system are also mentioned below:
- One of the major disadvantage of the new POS system is the cost related to the implementation of the system. It costs nearly £2000 to introduce new POS system. Many SMEs business are not capable enough to bear such expenses.
- The issues of power failure and the cost related to training of the employees to work on the new system may be quite high for the business to bear it (Stevens, 2013).
- Since all the activities are based on the system, managers who establish their own mission and vision are usually reduced. The managers are not given opportunity to showcase their skills.
- The new POS system also include maintenance fees which every business cannot afford it on the daily basis because it is not that cost efficient to implement new system (Galliers and Leidner, 2014).
The new POS system has created a great advantages on the market and its competitors. According the mentioned case study, the new POS system has reduced the work related to cash register and manual work. Moreover, the information related to any particular product is also determined by the new system (Hall, 2012).
Moreover, the new POS system helps to quote the actual price of the product by evaluating the actual demand and supply of the product rather than predicting the estimated demand and supply. Further in the price can easily be done based on the estimated demand and supply of the product. In addition to this, the managers with the help of new POS system tend to work with great efficiency and efforts because the system helps to reduce the work load of the managers. They majorly focuses on generating more amount of profit instead of calculating the stocks and sales history manually. All the data are evaluated on the system and the managers are more responsible towards their roles and responsibilities (Bauer et al., 2012).
The major advantages of having a centralized database are given below:
- It helps every business to keep the records related to membership, sales history, events and supplementary process. Centralized database aims at maintaining the reports and monitoring all the business activities at single location which further saves time.
- It maintains all the necessary data on the single platform rather than working on the multiple platform. This makes the user easy to get required information at a single click.
- The centralized database helps the employees to find out their name with the address at one place with a unique identification code. Each employees who works in the business should have unique identification code that must not be similar to one another (Laudon and Laudon, 2016).
- Data integrity is maintained with the help of centralized database which also help to reduce the duplication of data. It also put all the entire data together which do not create any chances of similarity.
- Employees can learn a lot on the single platform rather than investing time on learning on several platforms. It becomes difficult for the employees to manage group of platforms together and it may create complexity in the task as well (Paton, 2012).
The new POS system helps to take business decisions very wisely and the decisions taken must be cost effective i.e. it must match with the overall mission and vision of the company or any organization. The POS system helps to take accurate decision at the accurate time which will help to earn good profits as well. The decisions taken must be aligned with the goals and objectives related to overall activities of the organization. All the information are easily available at single locations that helps the managers to make better decisions (Etesse, West and Chasen, 2015).
POS system help the business gain competitive advantages
In addition to this, the POS system also manages and control the inventory units and the managers can easily estimate the current demand and supply of the total sales units so that they can quote the price of the products more accurately. This helps them to retain the necessary information related to the purchase and sales of the product. Thus, every decisions taken are dependent on the stock and inventory units (Pakhira, 2012). According to the given case, earlier managers used to predict the price of the product which may sometimes be wrong and this can easily be turned to heavy loss for the company because they were unaware about the total stocks they used to hold in their warehouse. This led to misconception and wrong decisions were taken. However, with the implementation of the new POS system, the managers are aware about the stocks and the decisions are taken accordingly (Coronel and Morris, 2016).
There are several types of telecommunication network which are commonly used. They are MAN, WAN and LAN. MAN stands for Metropolitan Area Network, WAN stands for Wide Area Network and WAN stands Wide Area Network. In addition to this, there are also other telecommunication network such as PAN (Personal area network), SAN (Storage area network), EPN (Enterprise area network) and VAN (Virtual area network) (Turban, Sharda and Delen, 2010).
Consequently, MAN, WAN and LAN aims at connecting one computers to another computer and helps to communicate with each other. All the different telecommunication works on different geographical locations. WAN is one of the biggest and widest area of network which aims at delivering the telecommunication services throughout the entire globe. Internet is one of the best example of WAN. Similarly, MAN provides the telecommunication network to small buildings which are located in a same city or town. It is bigger than LAN but smaller than WAN. Moreover, LAN is the connection of few computers which is connected on a similar building and this network is not that expensive as compared to WAN (Wild, 2017).
There are several wired technologies which includes cables such as:
- Shielded Twisted Pair (STP) Cable.
- Coaxial Cable.
- Fibre Optic Cable.
- Cable Installation Guides.
- Wireless LANs
In addition to this, wireless technologies which are commonly used in business activities to manage the entire operations are includes GPS units, garage door openers, wireless computer mice, keyboards and headsets, headphones, radio receivers, satellite television, broadcast television and cordless telephones, Unshielded Twisted Pair (UTP) Cable (Pahlavan and Krishnamurthy, 2011).
The risks and challenges involved in the implementation of new POS system is given below:
- Security: The data must be secured enough so that it cannot be replicated. Since the new POS system gives an opportunity to create a single platform so that repetition will not take place, it also solve the issues related to security concerns. It is very often that the data are easily hacked which in turn creates problem for the organization to handle.
- Privacy: Privacy is one another risk which states that all the recorded data must have certain privacy which so not gives an authority to every employees to gain the information. Only authorized person is liable to get such important information (Ryan, 2011).
- Confidentiality: All the data must be confidential and they must be secured with the passwords. Today, several cybercrimes take place which can easily be reduced by implementing correct strategy plans related to such crimes (Tempelmeier, 2011).
Here are few suggestions that can be followed by the business to run more smoothly.
- The managers should not be totally dependent on the new POS system because sometimes power failure, and other issues may create a problem for the business to manage.
- Apart from this, the business should also take care of the maintenance and the cost incurred by the implementation of the new POS system.
Conclusion
Thus, from the above report, it can be summarized that new POS system helps the business to keep the track of all the data in a system which includes sales contracts and sales history as well. It automatically reduces the work related to cash register. Apart from this, there are also wired and wireless telecommunications that are widely used in the business.
References
Bauer, D.G., Campero, R.J., Rasband, P.B. and Weel, M.D., Sensormatic Electronics Corp, 2012. Inventory management system. U.S. Patent 8,321,302.
Coffing, D. and Bonfiglio, L., 2017. Transaction system for business and social networking. U.S. Patent 9,600,674.
Coronel, C. and Morris, S., 2016. Database systems: design, implementation, & management. Cengage Learning.
Etesse, C.E., West, J.R. and Chasen, M.L., Blackboard Inc, 2015. Internet-based education support system and method with multi-language capability. U.S. Patent 9,053,500.
Galliers, R.D. and Leidner, D.E. eds., 2014. Strategic information management: challenges and strategies in managing information systems. Routledge.
Hall, J.A., 2012. Accounting information systems. Cengage Learning.
Laudon, K.C. and Laudon, J.P., 2016. Management information system. Pearson Education India.
Pahlavan, K. and Krishnamurthy, P., 2011. Principles of wireless networks: A unified approach. Prentice Hall PTR.
Pakhira, M.K., 2012. Database Management System. PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd.
Paton, N.W. ed., 2012. Active rules in database systems. Springer Science & Business Media.
Ryan, M.D., 2011. Cloud computing privacy concerns on our doorstep. Communications of the ACM, 54(1), pp.36-38.
Stevens, D., 2013. Personal business service system and method. U.S. Patent 8,494,878.
Tempelmeier, H., 2011. Inventory management in supply networks. Norderstedt: Books on Demand. Hua, G., Cheng, T.C.E. and Wang, S., 2011. Managing carbon footprints in inventory management. International Journal of Production Economics, 132(2), pp.178-185.
Turban, E., Sharda, R. and Delen, D., 2010. Decision Support and Business Intelligence Systems (required). Prentice Hall Learning Outcomes.
Wild, T., 2017. Best practice in inventory management. Routledge.