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Business/IT Strategies

We know that there are several organizations in our surrounding which are not able to perform well; we frequently hear some problems and issues with those organizations. Organizations related with food products, milk products are not able to sell the products in time and resulted expiry of the products.

• Why these organizations are not able to sell their product before the expiry date of the products?
• What went wrong?
• Don't the employees of those organizations have any knowledge about the products in their store?
• Were the employees not able to execute their responsibility in the right manner?
• Are these organizations using proper Management Information System?

These questions need to be answered. Whatever may be the issues, the use of Management information system (MIS) can help to solve most of the issues except irresponsibleness and lack of ownership of the employees.

Business Strategy Development

The above considered organizations can solve the problem of over stocking products in the store and not able to sale products before expiry by developing different business strategies. To develop business strategy, it is necessary to understand the goals and objectives of the organization. In the above given situations objective of the organization is to address problem of over-stocking. So, the products should be sold in time, that is before the exipiry of the products. The corporate office of the organizations can:

• develop, implement marketing plans and evalute the impact of those marketing plans
• keep track of sales of the products in each retail store
• make marketing plans for the locations where the sales is not according to the specified threshold.

IT strategy development

IT strategy is developed to implement the business strategies effectively and efficiently. Organizations first must be able to capture data and store in the database system. Database systems have Query processing modules with the help of which several information in different level of granularities can be retrieved. It will be better if front end (User Interfaces) are also developed using which users can retrieve data of their needs from the database system. So, basically IT strategy to implement business strategies for the considered organizations will focus on:

• Development database management system to keep track of the products in the store, products supplied to the retail stores; to track sell in the retail stores; to keep track of sales before and after the implementation of marketing plans.
• Networking of the retailers computers with the system of the organization such that sales done in the retailers is immediately reflected in the system of the corporate office.
• Data security: creating users, specifiying roles for them and providing priviledges to them. Use of firewalls.

How MIS can help those organizations?

MIS is software which processes data and produces information. Database is a collection of data and is a major component of the MIS. MIS can backend (Database system), front end (user interfaces), and middleware where application logics are implemented. In case of the food products organization, database will store data about the products, retail stores. As data is stored in database it can be easily known the status of the products in the store, in the retail stores; when which product will expiry? which are the good performing retail stores, which are not? The answers to these questions will enable employee to known the status of products and if it is necessary to make new marketing plans or not.

Database Design for the organizations

• Data about all the products should be stored properly in the database; product_name, manufacture_date, expiry_date, unit_price, quantity are the attributes of the products for which data must be collected and stored in the database.
• Database system has Structured Query Language (SQL) which enables to extract data on several conditions. Using SQL it can be immediately known the amount of products left in the store; which products are expire soon.
• Similary, these organziations can keep track of sell of their products in the retail stores; information about the sales made in retail stores can be uploaded immediately to the central database of the organization. The information about the sales in each retail store will enable the organization to know the sales status all the locations and develop and implement marketing strategies to increase sales in the non performing retail stores or think of some other alternative strategies to the sale products before their expiry.

Product

Prod_code	Description	Quantity	Manufac_date	Expiry_date

Retail Store

Retail Store ID	Location	Prod_code	Sale_date	Quantity

Products-to-retails

Retail Store ID	Prod_code	despatch_date	Quantity

The batch number should be appended with the prod_code