Answer To: HI5019 T XXXXXXXXXXMidTerm) - Assessment 2: Group Assignment 1 HOLMES INSTITUTE FACULTY OF HIGHER...
Dilpreet answered on Oct 14 2021
SYSTEM ANALYSIS AND SELECTION
Executive Summary
As most of the business organisations all across the globe are expanding themselves to withstand the increased competition and to maximise their profits by focusing on a wider section of the market, it has become essential for organisations to invest in Enterprise Resource Planning to support the growth and expansion of the business. ERP tools are capable enough to allow the business organisations to share a common process and data model. This report has been written with a purpose to evaluate and recommend an ERP software for Coles that can assist in smooth growth of the business.
Table of Contents
Introduction 4
Company Background 4
Key Business Processes of Coles 5
Software Features and Functionalities Supporting the Business Activities of Coles 5
Enterprise Resource Planning Systems 7
History of ERP Systems 7
Features and Functionalities of Three ERP Software Packages 8
SAP ERP 8
Oracle E-Business Suite ERP 9
Sage X3 11
Recommendations 11
Conclusion 12
References 13
Introduction
As most of the business organisations all across the globe are expanding themselves to withstand the increased competition and to maximise their profits by focusing on a wider section of the market, it has become essential for organisations to invest in Enterprise Resource Planning to support the growth and expansion of the business. In such case, Coles is no different from other business organisations, who have been expanding their business rigorously and therefore an ERP system is essential for them. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) can be described as an integrated management of the core processes of the businesses with the help of software and technology (Ali & Miller, 2017). ERP tools are capable enough to allow the business organisations to share a common process and data model. This report has been written with a purpose to evaluate and recommend an ERP software for Coles that can assist in smooth growth of the business.
Company Background
Coles Supermarket Australia Pty Ltd, which operates all across Australia with the name Coles is an Australian supermarket and retail chain, with its headquarters in Melbourne, Australia. Coles has managed to attract and retain a huge customer base by providing them with quality products essential for our daily survival at unimaginably low prices (Colesgroup, 2020). Coles is known all across Australia for selling groceries, fresh fruits, vegetables and meat. The business operations of Coles are dedicated towards delivering quality services to the Australian families so as to provide value to them for the money they spend. Coles has been taking sustainability and corporate social responsibility quite seriously and most of the strategies and business decisions of Coles revolves around these two aspects.
Chief business activities of Coles include operations associated with the sale of groceries and food through its supermarket chains all across Australia. In addition to this, other major activities of Coles include sale of liquor through its Coles liquor and sales of petrol through Coles Express outlets. Coles has also been reaching its customers through online stores to provide its customers with anytime and anywhere shopping experience. Coles has also come up with financial services under the name of Coles Financial Services, which has been providing the customers with services like persona loans, insurance and credit cards (ABDAT, 2019). With more than 2500 outlets all across Australia, Coles has managed to emerge as the largest competitor of the largest supermarket chain of Australia, which is Woolworths. The business activities of Coles are focused towards customer satisfaction and creating value for its shareholders in the long-term.
Key Business Processes of Coles
Coles is a business enterprise focused at providing exceptional services to its customers. In most of the cases Coles adds values to the products by acquiring products from the suppliers situated at remote locations and by assembling them into a regional warehouse, distributing them to the local stores through logistics and finally selling the products of the local suppliers to the customers under the brand name of Coles. The key business processes of Coles can therefore be described in a logical flow as gathering the products from the local suppliers and farmers, storing them into a regional warehouse, distributing them to the local stores, selling them to the local customers (Colesgroup, 2020).
The business processes of Coles can further be described as defining the business concept in terms of detailed set of system requirements. The requirements of the system being implemented by Coles is then transformed into a tangible design. This is then followed by constructing the structures, procedures, and agreements that are essential to make up a business. The final process of the business results into structures that are employed to facilitate the services provided by Coles. The functional activities of Coles begin with the remote suppliers, which produce and release the produced stock to be transported to the regional warehouse of Coles.
Transporters and logistics are an essential activity of the business to maintain a balance into its supply chain. The products are further being transported to the local stores, where the products are organised into the stores and the stock is displayed into these stores so that the products and services being offered by Coles can easily be accessed by its local customers. The local customers then shop the products at the stores and the stock is maintained over and over again following the same business processes (Colesgroup, 2020). The business processes in entirety can be summarised into four major business processes namely defining the core processes, designing the core processes, constructing core processes and provisioning the core processes.
Software Features and Functionalities Supporting the Business Activities of Coles
Coles is expanding at a very fast pace all across Australia and therefore, it has become essential for this supermarket giant to focus on optimising its business activities and to come up with a comprehensive framework, which can facilitate the activities of the business. In order to manage the activities and functionalities of the business in a most efficient and effective manner, Coles must consider deploying a software that will help to support the functionalities of its business. One of the primary features of the software that Coles must deploy to support the activities of its business is integration. Coming with a software that supports integration will ensure that all the business activities of Coles are on a single platform and work together for the benefit of the organisation in perfect sync and harmony with each other. This will help to manage, analyse and monitor all the data driven tasks of business and therefore, will help to ensure that there is an open communication between different departments of the business carrying on different activities (Jagoda & Samaranayake, 2017).
The software has to be backward compatible to ensure that it works well with the existing...