Business Systems Analysis and Design

Katherine Vieira

Business Systems Analysis and Design: Milestone one

Introduction

Brick-and-mortar is a small business that specializes in designer clothing, shoes and handbags. We offer our customers discounted prices on all accessories and clothes. We have employed two fulltime employees who work from Monday to Friday ten hours a day. We have also employed three part time employees who work on weekends for six hours. We own a basic website which has a list of products (trousers, skirts, shirts, suits, handbags, dresses, and scarfs) which customers can purchase from us.

The owner of the business wants to major on generating new revenue from e commerce. E commerce is transacting business through the internet. The business will need to introduce new technology in order to manage to generate e commerce revenue. Generating revenue through e commerce will be a challenge because new technology must be integrated into the business. For this to be possible I have decided to choose mobile commerce and intelligent systems.

Mobile commerce is where customers will use hand held phones to enable them to purchase items from our business easily through wireless internet.

Intelligent systems are machines, which has internet access and analyses data and communicates with numerous systems. These help to analyze an organizations data, processing and reporting. To be able to generate revenue efficiently, modern technology must be used to reach customers and collect data on various products.

Objectives

1. To establish the right business systems and design for addressing the challenges facing brick-and-mortar operations

2. To find out whether the traditional system in brick-and-mortar meets the needs of the customers at present and how to improve the situation in future

3. To discover the ways in which the customer interacts with the business in addition to the manner in which information flows through the business cycle

Business requirements

This business needs revenue arising from e commerce. To achieve this, the owner must be willing to upgrade and integrate new technology. The owner must be willing to start a new modern website so as to market the product and enable the customers to order items online. The website should also feature a payment section for clients to pay for goods.

As mentioned above, mobile commerce must be started immediately. The company should plan how a mobile based website or application will be developed to enable clients to order all our products online. The website or app must contain a field where customers can both order products and pay for them. Mobile commerce is effective because mobile phones are portable, easy to use and most people own them. Mobile phones also use wireless internet hence customers can order products from any geographical location and pay for them online. This will increase sales and profits because customers will be able to access our products and pay for them easily. Mobile commerce will be capable of reaching a lot of people hence popularize our products and successfully increase sales.

Business intelligent systems are a crucial part in business that will enable us to generate income. Business intelligent systems collects and analyses data giving you a prediction of market, weather changes or changes of other business parameters you feed it.

Market predictions may increase sales. In case our business predicts that the market for clothes will increase after sometime, we may increase our stock to need the needs of the market hence enable us to make higher sales. If business intelligent systems give us the correct predictions in market changes, it will enable us to prepare ourselves and make great sales.

These new technologies mentioned above will help us increase sales, attract more customers and popularize our products to as many people as possible. This will eventually lead to increased e commerce revenue.

Competitors and technology

These two technologies below (mobile commerce and intelligence systems) are being used by our competitors to increase sales among other thing. An example of these companies is Bluefly and Zappos.

1. Bluefly

Bluefly is a company that deals in designer clothes just like us.

The company uses intelligent systems to predict markets and weather changes in the future. A few years ago it predicted the weather change. Their systems predicted that the weather would be really cold after some moths. They stocked with warm and heavy clothes and when the cold came, as other companies ran out of warm clothes, they had plenty of them and they made massive sales. This technology really helped the company in making sales and profits than all other companies venturing in the same areas.

1. Zappos

Zappos is a company dealing with clothes and women wear.

It majorly uses mobile commerce to transact all of its business including marketing, sales, deliveries and payments.

Zappos website contains all of its products, the prices and a payment feature that allows users to pay for goods online. Last year, Zappos made the more sales than any other company through mobile commerce. They gained so much popularity from advertising their products in their mobile based application. This technology is benefiting Zappos through creation of sales and markets all over the world. Mobile commerce is easy to use hence a lot of people prefer it.

If our business adopts these new technologies we will be able to make large sales and generate significant profits. We will also be able to market our products worldwide and make easy the process of purchasing goods through mobile commerce. This will be a great step towards generating e commerce revenue.

Sources:

Siau, K., & Shen, Z. (2003). Building customer trust in mobile commerce. Communications of the ACM, 46(4), 91-94.

Barnes, S. J. (2002). The mobile commerce value chain: analysis and future developments. International journal of information management, 22(2), 91-108.

Goonatilake, S., & Khebbal, S. (1994). Intelligent hybrid systems. John Wiley & Sons, Inc..

Zilberstein, S. (1996). Using anytime algorithms in intelligent systems. AI magazine, 17(3), 73.