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Bms 400 Management Information Question Paper
Bms 400 Management Information
Course:Bachelor Of Commerce
Institution: Pwani University question papers
Exam Year:2014
Answer question One and any other Two
Question one
Read the caselet and answer questions that follow.
Many articles and business cases have been written about Wal-Mart. Most customers are probably familiar with the store and the overall concepts,but a considerable amount of work takes place to manage the large inventory, suppliers,pricing, customers, and employees. Wal-Mart has been a leader in using information technology to reduce costs. A huge part of succeeding in retailing is to provide the right products in the stores at the right price, when customers want to buy them. To succeed, Wal-Mart needs to forecast demand for every product in every store. Each product can have multiple variations—such as size or color. Individual items are commonly identified with an SKU number (stock-keeping unit), pronounced “skew.” Any Wal-Mart store has tens of thousands of SKUs. Of course, all of this data needs to be tracked by IT. Wal-Mart also can track personal purchases-based on credit and debit cards. All of the data from every store is collected and sent to
the central servers at Bentonville, Arkansas.In 2002, Wal-Mart primarily focused on using its home-grown custom code on its centralized systems (Lundberg 2002). In an interview, CIO Kevin Turner noted that a key to Wal-Mart''s success was continued striving to improve. His goals for the IT organization are to (1) run a centralized operation, (2) use common platforms, and (3) “be merchants first and technologists
second.” His first two conditions are important to holding down costs. It also makes it easier to transfer personnel among stores. Turner noted that the process was challenging when the standardized systems were first introduced to stores in other countries. The answer was to build a flexible system that still allowed local managers to make decentralized decisions but using centralized data. Turner emphasizes the importance of matching IT to the business needs—and simplifying all tasks. As one step in developing systems, the IT department requires developers to go out and perform the function before writing system specifications or designing changes. For example, a developer might spend a day working a cash register to understand the pressure and data-entry requirements.
Even as early as 2002, Wal-Mart was working on RFID(Radio Frequency Identification). With an effort to reduce costs per chip, the ultimate goal was to replace bar codes with RFID chips. Even using the chips at the warehouse level would make it easier and faster to identify and route
packages. Even in the store, finding products can be a problem. Carolyn Walton (no relation to the founder), an analyst noted that when she was working on the floor, it once took them three days to find a box of a specific hair spray in the back room—resulting in lost sales. If the box had been tagged with RFID, it could have been found in minutes with a hand-held scanner.Turner noted that Wal-Mart also spends a considerable amount of time in the re-search labs of its technology partners—working with universities and companies to see which technologies will be
useful and how they might be modified to apply to Wal-mart?s problems.
In 2003, Linda Dillman became CIO of Wal-Mart (Sullivan 2004). One of her biggest projects was the introduction of RFID tags, but the IT department was also working on 2,500 business-technology projects. As with most projects, the bulk of the RFID work was done using in
-house programmers and software—with no outsourcing. Despite its large staff and heavy involvement, Wal-Mart spends less than typical retailer son IT—below one percent of worldwide revenue.In 2004, a 423-terabyte Teradata system was the heart of the system used to store and analyze the
main sales data. Data is collected from the stores on an hourly basis, cleaned and transferred to the data warehouse.Managers can monitor sales in real time and make almost instant corrections on the sales floor. In terms of e-commerce, the company eventually moved to IBM?s WebSphere system largely for its scalability.In 2006, Linda Dillman repeated the main points that drive the IT department: (1) merchants first,(2) common systems and platforms, and (3)centralized information systems. A secondary benefit of the centralized approach is that the data warehouse (Retail-ink) is provided to the suppliers who can also monitor sales in real time to help them plan production runs. The system also enables them to track the status of ships through the distribution centers to the retail stores. Providing another set of eyes and analysts in tracking sales and shipments.By 2010, Wal-mart was processing over one million customer transactions an hour; generating databases estimated to contain at least 2.5 petabytes (Economist 2010). Rollin Ford, the CIO in 2010 emphasized the importance of processing and analyzing the huge amount of data: “Every day I wake up and ask „how can I flow data better, manage data better, analyze data better.
” (Economist 2010)
Required:
1.Highlight the problems Wal-Mart faced with under utilization of technology.(10 mks)
2.Discuss how Wal-Mart has integrated strategy with Information Systems to build competitive advantage.(15mks)
3.As an expert, identify the areas of improvement to ensure sustainability of competitive advantage for Wal-Mart.(5mks)
Question Two
“Management of change is a critical activity that highly determines the success of a project.”In light of this statement and reference to the case in Question one above,critically discuss the challenges Wal-Mart must have faced during development and implementation of technology and
how they would effectively manage the change process.(20 mks)
Question three
Using an illustration critically discuss how Enterprise Applications can be applied along the Value Chain to achieve maximum efficiency and effectiveness in organizations.(20 mks)
Question four
a)Explain how organizations embark on the process of System Analysis & Design (SAD).(10 mks)
b)“To build and maintain systems organizations can choose either to do it in-house or outsource.” Discuss.(10mks)
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