Sew what free essay sample

How do information technologies contribute to the business success of Sew What? Inc.? Give several examples from the case regarding the business value of information technology that demonstrates this conclusion. Ans: Sew What? Inc. , a small company founded in 1992 by Megan Duckett from Australia, is a theatrical drapery manufacturing company. It was the business operated in tiny home kitchen and specializes in making custom theatrical draperies and fabrics for stages. Initially, she has grown up her business from tiny kitchen and operation by â€Å"world to mouth†. She lost a big contract due to lack of credibility in her business as mentioned by her potential customer. She realized that it was failure due to lack of information technology in business. Here are some examples that justify the contribution of information technology to the business success of Sew what? Inc: By the use of information technology, business earned the credibility and having more clients. We will write a custom essay sample on Sew what or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page When she launched her website people started noticing her firm and her business getting growth. Information technology helped Since Sew what? Inc provides really good costumer experience through a very convenient way to its customers. Organization’s site in different languages helped the people speaking different languages around the world to know and understand the business which helped the business to grow worldwide. Website of organization contained the details of everything they did. It was through Information Technology, Duckett come to know about the National Federation of Independent Small Business Award. Sew what? Inc won several awards mostly because of use of information technology in convenient and effective way for the development of the business. Use of information technology has helped the organization to reduce the cost of operation. Hence, By using information technologies, Sew What? a very small business started from a kitchen became popular around the globe . Information technology has been very important tool for its success about. If it had not been for information Technology Sew what? Inc would have been limited in the kitchen. b) If you were a management consultant to sew what? Inc, what would you advice Megan Duckett to do at this point to be even more successful in her business? What role would information technology play in your proposals? Provide several specific recommendations. Answer: It’s apparent that she has wisely been using IT for providing best customer service. However, she fails in using IT for in-house process. If she could capitalize the use of IT in both â€Å"employee† and â€Å"customer† related strategies, she could have gained competitive edge over the competitors. Therefore, the manual practice of sign-in and sign-out should be replaced by automated sign-in and sign-out sheet. The new system would help trace her employees’ actual performance that would give a clear insight of the hours worked by the employee and no hours worked are taken into account. This will reduce operation costs that will add the value to the firm and ultimately to the â€Å"customer†. Not to limit the incorporation of IT into employees’ spreadsheet only, she should also work out on including IT as Operations Support System and Management Support System. That is to say, she should design a system to monitor and control industrial process and to support team workgroup and enterprise communications and collaborations which is not visible in her current business system. In addition, such system would help Sew What? Inc. emerge as a knowledge creating company that keeps the company way ahead of their competitors. Furthermore, she should also acknowledge the benefit of integrating IT in the value chain that ultimately aims at providing customer satisfaction. Since intranet and extranet do not exist in her company, she should focus on these technologies, being essential elements of value chain system. The system should be employee friendly so as to give all employees a complete view of each customer regarding preferences and profitability. I would suggest Megan Duckett to use IT in the following ways. Use IT to substantially reduce the cost of business process. Use IT to lower the cost of customer or suppliers. Develop new IT features to differentiate products and services. Use IT features to reduce the differentiation advantage of competitors. Use IT features to focus products and services at selected market niches. Use IT to create virtual organization of business partners. c) How could the use of information technology help a small business you know be more successful? Provide several examples to support your answer. Answer: In this competitive world, information technology is regarded as an asset for survival and success of an organization, smaller or bigger. It helps management in decision making which requires the IT to be the interface with employees as well. That means, all the employees along with the owner should make proper use of IT in the day to day business activities. One of the grocery stores, I know, is doing very good business. However, it has not made any provision of IT in its business. Had it installed IT in its business, the success and the profitability of the store would have gone up to the great extent. It’s been operating its business manually that has restricted its success and profitability to a certain limit. It has not yet realized IT as the critical factor to gain competitive advantage over the other stores, locally as well as globally. Though it has realized the value of customers and is trying to avail customer-focused services to its customers, it has not been able to succeed at the business due to failure to effectively use the IT in its store. It has neither a system to record and track the inventories in the store, nor a system to process customers order. It should manually count and check the inventories level in the store. There is no system to automatically track the level of inventory and thus the shortage in the store cannot be detected in a timely basis. That might result in lower customer service since the store may not make available of goods at right time. Therefore, it should design a proper customer and transactional database backed up by the intranets, extranets and internet technology. Such customer database segmented by preference of and profitability from each customer should be accessed by all the employees. Intranets facilitate every employee to get each customer’s profile. Similarly, transaction database through internet and extranet should facilitate each customer to place order directly, and check the order history and delivery status. If possible, the store should also build a Web community of customers and the employees that would make the customer feel special and delighted. The following figure will explain how the use of information technology would help the store be more successful: