Importance of IT for Coles
Coles is the company that is the major retailer in the country of Australia. The major business of the firm is the business of supermarket. It has been analyzed that there are around 10,000 teams that work for the company in the county. As the company operates in the retail sector, it is essential for the firm to communicate with the distributors, suppliers and also to the customers and the team (Turban, Leidner, McLean and Wetherbe, 2008). The company wants to implement the free flow of information among the team members and thus it requires an IT tool that supports the communication of the company. This company is the part of daily lives of the people as the customers buy the daily need products from Cole’s supermarkets (Applegate, Austin and McFarlan, 2007). This requires the company to efficiently deal with the customers. The fulfillment of the daily requirements of the customers can only be possible if the team of the company communicates with each other. Thus, according to the current situation of the company, it is being anal used that communication is the basic need of the firm which need innovation in terms of IT.
There are two major importance of IT for Coles in these days that are briefly discussed below:
Internal communication: It supports the company to enhance its internal communication. As discussed in the above section that the company is in higher need of spontaneous communication software for the teams of the company thus, it tools in Coles provides the company with the effective internal communication (Buhalis and Law, 2008).
Better customer support: The online portal of the firm is an IT tool that is used to communicate with the customers. This tool helps the customers to order the choice of products they wants. The portals are the medium so that the company and the customers can be linked together (Celuch, Murphy and Callaway, 2007). The customer’s service section of the portal gives the liberty of generating the service requests and comments for the customers.
Innovation: It brings innovation to the business. It eases out the process that is being conducted in the organization. If the company is using the IT tool for communication than the communication becomes faster and the process become efficient in nature.
IT tools need to be implemented in the organization but requires some of the activities and decision that needs to be taken by the firm before implementation (Chen, Mocker, Preston and Teubner, 2010). The company needs to face many challenges when it implements some of the new IT project or programs in the business process. This is because it changes the overall processes of the firm. There are many pre-requisites of implementing the new IT tool is the firm. Some of them are as follows:
Planning: Planning is the most important part of the company. Coles plan everything before implementing anything (Schubert and Leimstoll, 2007). It is very much essential for the companies to do planning because it maps out the activities that are required to do in order to implement the new program.
Pre-requisites of IT tools implementation
Designing: Planning is the first step that the company uses. After planning about the whole program the second stage is designing (Davenport, 2013). It is very important to design the It tool acceding to the requirement of the company. The tool oat Coles is designed by Microsoft. This tool is designed in order to communicate internally among the tool members.
Cost of the program: This is one of the main requirements for the program. In order to decide the cost of the program that activities of the program is being dissociated and the cost of the activities are being linked (Kohli and Grover, 2008). Along with the cost of the program the cost of training and the equipment’s require to implement the program.
Hardware installation: In case go implementation of the software program, it is mandatory to install the hardware. The hardware requires in case of Coles were the computers and the devices that are being used to share the information
Training: This is one of the most important requirements. As the program has been installed in the organizational processes, the employees that are using that program needs to be trained in order to make use of that program (Li, Peters, Richardson and Weidenmier Watson, 2012). This is because the employee do not have the knowledge bout the operations of the IT tool s then it will not be efficient to use the same.
Cole is the firm that selects licenses from Microsoft. The licenses were in number of around 103,000. Microsoft has integrate some of its applications such as SharePoint, exchange business, Skype online and online social networking. The company is introduced the cloud commuting model that helps in making the HR functions very easy. Mycoles is the collaboration portal that has implemented by the company (Nickels, McHugh and McHugh, 2008). This portal is made in order to provide some of the facilities to the employees of the fir. The employees or the team of the companies that are spread all over the country can easily communicate with the portal. Mycoles is the communicate channel as well as the online portal that simplify the work for the team members of the company (Rogsch and Klingsch, 2012). They can easily share information through it. They have their accounts with the order id according to their employee id which can be accessed by them only. They came share any information on the portal. This application has replaced the prior email strategies to share the information to all.
Coles is the company that also needs management assistance. This management assistance for the firm is framed by the cloud vantage. Cloud vantage services are the service that facilitates the company with the lifecycle management assistance. Loud solution is the company that has been associated with Coles I order to provide them the IT solutions.
Improving customer’s service: Coles is the company that is using Mycoles in order to deliver the great shopping experience to the team. The team members with the access of Mycoles can serve the customers in better effective way. The team uses two of the applications such as Microsoft office 365 and the portal of Mycoles to serve the customers.
IT tools used in Coles
Provides innovation: This portal of Mycoles allows the team members to share their innovative ideas on the portal. Thus, it is the medium that can generate new innovation for the firm to hence the business (Farkas, 2007). The CEO of the firm considers this tool as the encouraging tool that encourages the ideas of innovation of the employees. The best example of this is use of Yammers by the store managers of Coles. By this tool the manes share their way of making the store to all the members in the country.
Simplify the processes and cost reduction: The tool called office 365 has simplified the manual process that has been conducted in the store (Bass, 2007). The manual processes of the company have been replaced by the software which also reduces the human efforts of the company. Earlier, it has been identified that 80,000 of the company’s team members have no digital presence but now they have. This suggests that the employees of the company are getting updated. This technological improvement in the company has improved the knowledge of the team members at the individual as well as the professional level.
Data protection: This is major risk that has been associated with the portal. As the company has all the data of the customers on their portal, so it is required by the firm implementation monitoring process that saves the data and keep it secured (Fuchs, 2009).
Confidentiality: As the company is working with third party for the IT solutions, it is also important for maintaining the confidentiality of the data (Brenner, Zarnekow and Wittig, 2012). The third party can leak the data of the company as the company needs to share with the third party to make the programs.
Monitoring of IT tool can be referred to as the process of evaluating the effectiveness of the tools in the company. It is also important for the firm to manage the IT tools the company is using. This is because up gradation of the software and the introduction of the recent technology is also very important (Bellifemine, Caire, Poggi and Rimassa, 2008). A proper process should be followed by the companies in order to analyze the efficiency of the software tools that has been used by the company. As far as the Coles are concerned, this company owns an IT department that is responsible for implementation, designing as well as monitoring such tool. This helps the company to gain the desired outputs from the implemented software.
Conclusion and recommendations:
It has been concluded from the study that Information technology tools are very important for the companies like Coles which are operating in the food and retail industry. This is because the companies need to track the records of the customer as well as if the employees. For implementing these tools, the company needs to plan the activities in the end have to monitor the tools as well. It has been recommend to the firm that it should maintain the consistency in the tools and update the tools with latest technology.
References:
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