IT 203 Information Technology for Management

2

Student one

Supply chain management is the management of goods and services flow which includes all the procedures that are required to transform raw materials into the final product. It involves enhancing and simplifying the business’ supply-side activities to gain customer value and competitive advantage in the market, thus maximizing profits.

SCM speaks to exertion by providers to create and execute supply chains that are as proficient and prudent as possible. The supply chain process includes everything from production to implementing information systems, logistics to track where the sold products go in order to use this information to drive future sales.

Some of the steps involved in establishing a successful supply chain management system:

· Designing a SCM plan once the business is established

· Implementing the plan by controlling the variables involved

· Monitoring the performance at each step

· Efficient communication with the supply chain partners thus controlling the flow of the process

Successfully implementing the SCM techniques and solution enables businesses to optimize production flow, information flow, and financial flow. Here are some major advantages that a company can benefit from successfully implementing supply chain management.

· Implementing SCM practices such as demand and sales forecasting enables businesses to improve product flow and avoids both underproductions as well as overproduction. SCM also allows traceability and visibility of movement of goods from supplier to customer.

· In the current era, customers are used to real-time responses and easy access to the goods and services, which makes information flow a crucial aspect of SCM. Inadequate information flow due to a disrupted supply chain can lead to poor customer-supplier relationships. By successfully implementing supply chain management, companies can avoid such constraints and improve the quality of information sharing by filling up the gaps.

· Effective supply chain management measures enable businesses to address cash flow challenges and let them carefully evaluate the procedures by identifying the variables that slow down the overall process that hinders the cash flow.

· The supply chain is flooded with data. By successfully collecting, analyzing, and implementing this data, a business can have an upper hand over its competitors in a market. Data platform (DPaaS) such as OpenText data management and security solutions helps organizations handle data-driven tasks and thereby increase their revenues.

A classic example of a company investing in the technological aspect of SCM is Walgreens. In 2016, Walgreens invested a heft amount in the technology department of their SCM. This addition to their supply chain can now synthesize relevant data and used analytics to forecast customer purchase behaviors, and then modified its supply chain such that it can meet expected demand. This move drastically raised their profit margin by completely avoiding access inventory associated costs such as warehousing and transportation.

 

Student 2

Business and technology

The market is growing bigger by the day, and every business now adopting the technology to compete in the market. This is creating the more competitive market with more advancement In the business as well. The more challenging market is, more innovative and creative the business would become. Now system and computer technologies are have really changed the businesses as the ecommerce have introduced to the world. Ecommerce business is now the most improving and boosting industry right now. Previously, there used to be markets and brands on the road and people used to go there and do shopping from there. But now it’s all online and have provided all the resources to the user on their computer, laptop or even on their mobile phone. From pin to the plane, everything can be available to the user from ecommerce. There are some great business which have shifted the course of businesses over these years. Walmart and Amazon is the best example for this. These websites have made the whole new grounding for the shopping and purchasing and created the more profitable for the user and seller both. These technology oriented businesses have changed the tides for the business shares and new markets in the global area. Now everyone is trying to shift online for their business to grow. To do the business through online ecommerce, business can reach more people through social media marketing and also achieve more revenues in the process because of the cost of physical existence of the business and also the cost of reduction in the middle chain of supplier and distributors are also being minimized in the process that creates more opportunity for the profit.

SWOT analysis

After these discussions we need to see that there are some opportunities for the business which provide the business a little jump and that’s because of the forecasting of market trends, and customer preferences. These things helps to grow the business and technology provide great assistance to the business with the help of data analysis and decision support system which allows the business to take more responsible and more accurate decision about upcoming trends. These provides the strengths to the business because these trends are the source of achieving maximum profits out of it. Like the masks selling in the COVID19’ outbreak. Every online website forecast the use of Mask as necessary, so it was gone higher in demand and prices both. Business utilized the trends in the market and create huge profit out of it.

There are some weakness for the business too and that is the variation and change in technology time to time. Technology is changing rapidly, now whats in the trends it could be replaced by some other technology after an year. Like an year or two there was less concept of hybrid technology development in the application but right now hybrid application is all over the place which has reduced the development cost for the application and made it more easier but it could be changed after an year or so. So these rapid change can be time and cost consuming for the business too.

Threats are those departments which covers the adaptability for the technology. If someone is still trying to market the idea and business through road flyer or news channels. It won’t be successful because that won’t be enough to reach the people which consume 18 hours on the phone or social media. Other threat is to not adapt the change in the technology too. If someone is still trying to have the native applications on both platform like IOS and Android then it would cost him more than the hybrid application. So he would be wasting the cost and time both for that.