INFORMATION SYSTEM.

Case Study: Florentino

Florentino is a bar in North Sydney, owned by university friends Antonio and Marisa, who

share the same passion in hospitality, and decided to open the bar together in 2014 after

their graduation. Florentino has been doing well, however, the pair realises that their

business must catch up with technology if they want to remain competitive. They know that

they need to upgrade their IT infrastructure, but having little knowledge about IT, they are not

sure what technology they should invest in, and how much.

Antonio and Marisa have a vision that their bar will provide a relaxed community

atmosphere, with good drinks and good music. However, they operate in a very competitive

business environment and feel pressure from the marketplace and also from their customers

to be more technologically advanced. They are not only competing with other clubs and local

restaurants, but with the threat of substitute products or services including theatres. Further

they have a social and legal responsibility to manage underage consumption of alcohol.

Therefore they need a solid strategy and wonder whether IT may help accomplish their

vision while addressing these challenges.

For their day-to-day operation, data collection has also always been important to Antonio

and Marisa. However, their form of data collection is only to keep up with paper receipts and

is never well organized. In addition they have no way to measure and track individual sales,

customers, products, and many other important things like night of the week, type of music

playing, etc. Even more important, they do not know very much about their customers. Why

do they come? What do they like? What do they wish was better? What are the most popular

food and drink items? How can they best reach their customer base? Etc.

With more data collection however, Antonio and Marisa have to think about possible issues

concerning privacy and ethics. Should they use their information systems to track the

number of alcoholic beverages their customers purchase? If they do, is it ethical to limit a

customer? Should they request a release form to continue to sell drinks after a certain point?

The network at Florentino has consisted of only a digital subscriber line (DSL) and a

computer. Antonio and Marisa know that they need to upgrade this network infrastructure if

they are want to collect data from different customer contact points and create a connected

working environment and community atmosphere where customers can connect wirelessly.

However they do not know what kind of telecommunication network they should bring into

Florentino, if they want to build other communication tools such as a website, Facebook,

Twitter, etc., how they should be built, and how they should be used. With the pressure to

advance technology, they also wonder about whether mobile computing may create some

competitive advantage for Florentino where customers can make their orders “on the go”.

A problem that Florentino has to deal with is shrinkage. Shrinkage occurs when a bartender

pours someone a little more alcohol than the drink recipe calls for, gives someone a free

drink, or accidentally spills alcohol on the floor. This shrinkage may not seem like much, but

on a large scale (including food items) it can make a huge difference. What Antonio and

Marisa need is data and decision support, which in the IT world is called “business

intelligence”. They need to know how to set and measure monthly and weekly goals to know

whether they are track to make their overall goal of $300,000 net profit a year. They hope to

use Excel as their decision support tool, using analysis techniques such as what-if analysis

or goal-seeking analysis.

With regards to suppliers, Florentino’s suppliers have offered electronic data processing

(EDP) for years, however, Antonio and Marisa have always placed their orders via the

telephone. They are now wondering how EDP might help them?

And with all of the different information systems that Florentino may acquire, how can they

be integrated together???