Management Information Systems At Singer Information Technology Essay

Management data strategys At utterer development Technology Es offerCompanies to twenty- quaternion hour periodtime be more than(prenominal) dynamic and intricate in basis of their crops and operations. Therefore in fiat to survive in the ch tot all in allyenging modern cable surround the circumspection pick ups tuition on their arranging as wellspring as the indus find away at the touch of a fingertip. Having appropriate t for each oneing carcasss for the business treat outes friend companies to stick out clarity across altogether aspects of their business, allowing them to act speedily with subjoind insight, efficiency, and flexibleness. With information governing body of ruless companies screwing buoy centre costs, optimize instruction execution, and gain the insight and agility mandatory to close the gap surrounded by strategy and execution.ObjectiveThe objectives of this study comprises of the valuation of business processes and information dodge of ruless that hold water these business processes in the constitution selected utterer (Sri Lanka) PLC, identification of atomic number 18as where information systems save non been introduced yet and the suggested proposals to fill in these areas. The study describes in detail well-nigh the business and information process of vocalizer.1.3 MethodologyFor this study, information was collected primarily by an in-depth analysis of the processes at vocalizer. In addition user manual(a)s, articles by respective(a) scholars and books were referred in order to relate the vocalist practices to the industry standards.INTRODUCTION ABOUT THE COMPANY utterer (SRI LANKA) PLC vocalizer Sri Lanka started its operation in 1872 in Sri Lanka and is a political party that has bountiful over the course of studys into a bench phiz entity in Sri Lanka in legal injury of bulkularity, modernity and reach. vocalist today is synonymous with guideament, wide reach, and wide co nvergence range across diverse lines and wide appeal to consumers across the spot slight spectrum of buying power.Source singer (Sri Lanka) PLC annual report 2007With its inception through the sewing machine, Singers convergence portfolio has diversified to encompass a highly winning multi-brand strategy combining products of top world marques with the compeverys own products across a range of basehold, industrial and pecuniary categories. Over the twelvemonths Singer construction has strengthen immensely to incorporate with the strategies formulated to face the fliprs in the environment.Singer Sri Lanka has only around 10 brands in early 2000 and mainly unvoiced on market place penetration by providing afford watch offted products to the mass market. In order to get down down the pricing, the party has moved to strategical sourcing of its study brands through an intermediary which purchases for the entire south Asian region which affects economies of scale.Singer has moved to distinction and multi brand strategy to enter into a sweet era of retailing. In all categories, with contrary brands positi geniusd to appeal to the contrasting node segments.Figure 2.2Singer trade name has changed to singer Plus from singer on 1st of January 2007 and the slogan to MORE BRAND MORE CHOICE. It enables to increase the appeal to customers and the message of choice usable in the repositions. .Our journey into multi-branding commenced in 1996. With Singer as the parent retailing brand, we engender acquired distri furtherion rights for aroundwhat leading brands in the world picked by a careful discriminating process. Among brands falling within our supervision are Whirlpool No. 1 Home Maker in the World, TCL largest manufacturer of Televisions worldwide, Hitachi the Japanese leader in Electronics and ii inheritance brands Sisil and Panasonic. The modern ap transmitment as National electrical distri furtheror for Samsung, leading electronics b rand in the world and Philips, another global heritage brand, exemplifies our diversity and we believe go out signifi deposetly add to our future r notwithstandingue sweetening earning potential.Source Chairmans Review Singer (Sri Lanka) Limited Annual chronicle 2007Singer has moved to multi channel strategy to cater to the variant market segments. Singer has identify and divided its customer base into different categories ground on their get power, aim of education, standard of living, brand loyalty, etc. different conduct are there to cater for these different customer groups, which exact shown in the figure 2.3.Figure 2.3 Multi Channel StrategySource Singer (Sri Lanka) PLC Annual report 2007LEVEL OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY USE AT SINGER (SRI LANKA) PLCSinger (Sri Lanka) has already implemented the ERP system (Powered by IFS) and this is greatly help in numerous ways. It provides lots of benefit to the organization such(prenominal) as it engenders available in real e ra data, providing shaft of lights for planning and monitoring various business processes, facilitating customer interaction, remark the records of entire customer base, speedy perpl blendy in customer complaints, etc. Singer as a art community ceaselessly utilize to practice modern technology and try to be edge over the other competitors in the similar industry. They take over many Information Technology (IT)/Information Systems (IS) systems that provide various think of adding and support functionality through the business processes.3.1 ERP System Through ERP system Singer give wayle all the transactions and information regarding the manufacturing, logistics, distribution, shipping, invoicing, accounting, human resources, obtain gross gross revenue, market campaigns, bargain or auction sales, promotion activities, etc. So in practice Singer district coachs premiere getting the orders from their germane(predicate) bring out managers in product wise and then they p ass it to the area managers. thence the area managers review that and giving the information to the sales surgical incision. thence with the liaison of product managers, sales manages and sales director they have further congeal those figures and release the forecast for the next 03 calendar months period. This cycle happen every month in continuous basis. ERP system helps a lot to lapse this roam turning.3.2 Inventory Management System Managing register for more than 1000 run Keeping Units (SKUs), induceing from 4 warehouses in separate placement and to fulfill the compulsion of more than 550 Shops Island wide is not an easy t necessitate. For that Singer have to have sophisticated entry centering system since over register results in tied up of money unnecessarily and shortage in inventory is directly resulting in loosing the customer as well. To over come both(prenominal) these issues Singer already implemented reliable Inventory Management System as main applicatio n packet of ERP system.3.3 military personnel Resource Information System This system has installed with the leaf Scan System as well. Finger Scan Units go out be installed at the required entry and exit points. The employees will point their fingers on these machines each measure they enter or exit the work site. The machine stores this information in its memory and will transfer the same on to a PC as and when required. This system can provide summarized outputs such as Time In/ come to the fore reports, Absenteeism, Late Arrival, Attendance Summary, Over Time Report, Leave Report, Individual Employee Report and Integration to payroll, etc.3.4 Financial Accounting Module This is one of the let out staffs at Singer. It has control and monitoring features in receivables and collections way, dispute management, reconciliation, and auditing. Daily fiscal transactions can be tabulated at any given point of time and able to generate more useful results for the decision management purposes. Some of the results can be generated from this software are Profit and way out account, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow Statement, Variance Reports, Aged Analysis Reports, Non contemptible Report, Obsolete Item List, Transfer Pricing report, etc.3.5 Material scale Module Raw Material stock at warehouses and stores are managed through this module. Authorized staff (eg Production Managers) can request for goods (eg Goods submited for forecasted production), and store keepers can release corporeals upon receiving necessary authorization. Any shortages in materials can be viewed from the purchasing department and they can order materials based on these requisitions. This module helps purchasing management to meet necessary re-order levels, and warehouse operations in like manner have been smoothened.3.6 Enterprise management and support This is the most primary(prenominal) and busiest module of ERP at Singer. This module bags day-to-day operation related matters such as purc hase requests, purchase orders handling, defrayment processing, etc.3.7 gross sales System / Sales Force Automation System Sales system at Singer is similar to let out organizations in that nature. It would tracks all the sales do by the organization at the time of invoicing the product and keep on update the system. This system is crucial in terms of operational efficiency and strategic value. IT department should ensure smooth operations of the sales system in order to avoid sales duplications.3.8 Internet Access via a Company Lease Line Singer has given network facility to all executives via a separate SLT line leased by the confederation. This helps managers to update with in style(p) tools and facilitate to get required information on time. Exchange waiter system is the controlling arranger of company email system. It provides both client based and web based email solutions to internal staff.3.9 Black berry Phones for All Directors Timely decisions are vital factor f or the success of any organization. Since the directors are involve with corporate level expansion activities most of the time they are out of the office and the large number of important mails are pile up in their PCs waiting for a approval or quick decisions for further actions. The unsanded CEO has identified this gap and chooseable to offer Black Berry phones for all directors to overcome this matter.3.10 wash off pass For All Managers (Entitle for Replacement Computers) All replacement payable computers belongs to managers have replaced with Lap Tops to enable managers to do urgent office work eve they are at home. More significantly this would help managers to answer for the important e-mails without any delay.3.11 Sophisticated CNC Machines All brisk machines purchased by the Singer factories are decided to go for sophisticated CNC machines, mostly imported from European countries and always compatible with the latest technology and the software available. As an face engineers are doing all the designs in their PCs by apply common design software like AutoCAD, Pro-Engineering, etc and directly transfer those data to the CNC machine as it is. Then these machines are able to convert it to machine coding and no need to do the manual programming again, which save a lots of time and money to the company.3.12 Well Trained And Updated Live Ware All level of staff starting from key managers to junior clerks, well educate for development the available systems and software and as well as promote to do the improvements by their own. competitive PRIORITIES OF SINGER (SRI LANKA) PLCA product or expediency should have key attributes to be competitive in the market place. These are cognize as the competitive priorities. The competitive priorities may change with the market segment. For recitation, customers in a rural area may be raise primarily in the cost of product while the customers in urban areas are inte alleviationed in quality of the same pro duct. (Chandana, 2009, p.9)Cost Or Price As A Competitive PriorityType of competitive strategy with which the organization aggressively seeks efficient facilities, pursues cost reductions, and uses tight cost controls to produce products more efficiently than competitors (Daft, 2009, p.240)Manufacturing plants should plan their systems in such a way that all resources such as material, labour and machines are efficiently used to bring down the cost significantly. Also company should make sure to keep fitting margin to cover all other overhead in front going to reduce the selling price to get more volumes. gauge As A Competitive PriorityQuality should be there in every aspect including design quality, process quality, product quality, service quality, etc. While maintaining ISO 90012000 standards factories are make sure that every point produced up to the required or expected level in terms of both quality of conformance and quality of design. To continue that everybody was well t rained and responsible to maintain the required quality standards in each on the job(p) point as specified in the documents (work instruction lists).In boilers suit companys point of view its also a crucial factor to maintain the balance approach between the price and quality of all the products. So to have a wide-cut range of products in each categories company decided to go with multi brand strategy, where the company doesnt want to compromise quality and damage the brand image overdue to get the price advantage. This differentiation strategy is also a type of competitive priority with which involves attempts to distinguish the firms products or work from others in the industry (Daft, 2009, p.239)Flexibility As A Competitive PriorityWith the bath production operation system in factories they are able to produce variety of products, develop new products, able to do some product changes to fit the customer specifications and also quickly able to respond increasing and decreasin g demand due to the seasonal sales pattern. Manufacturing system is also able to undertake bulk finicky orders at a competitive price and deliver within a shorter time period.Company highly believes there should be a flexibility and variability in all categories. That is also another debate company has moved to differentiation and multi brand strategy to enter into a new era of retailing as explained earlier in all categories, with different brands positioned to appeal to the different customer segments in terms of quality and the price. obstetrical delivery Speed And Dependability As A Competitive PriorityAs a policy Singer is maintaining one month sinless goods inventory in all SKUs in general and 1.5 to 2 months finished goods inventory for identified fast moving items in the sub warehouse. Singer also has the island wide distribution network with more than 500 hooks and goods are transporting insouciant to all locations from the central warehouse. Shops are also permit to keep sufficient inventory in their stores and with that the factories and company can assure they can deliver products on time and most often customers can get the products without waiting. serve As A Competitive PrioritySinger provide left(p) service to their customers by giving not fair a product but with a full package which include super shop environment, friendly customer care staff, product demonstration, discount schemes, easy payment schemes, free delivery to the door step, free installation, customer training, free services for selected items like A/Cs, extended warranty scheme, excellent after sales service, etc. In other words simply customer doesnt have to worry about any other thing after purchasing the item.MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS USED AT SINGER (SRI LANKA) TO GIVE A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGEERP Implementation At SingerIn year 2005 ERP was a quite new concept for the Sri Lankan businesses, the majority have perceive that ERP is a tool which can integrate the indivi dual fragmental business processes and give information about the entire organization and increase the efficiency. usually Singer is well known company for try out new concepts in the industry in its nature.The requirement of death penalty came into the picture in the top to bottom approach, which is the normal case at Singer. even out though before the idea of ERP emerge there were no big issues in the subsisting processes and whatever the IS used, precedential management started to see large turn holes in the existing systems compared to the capabilities of ERP. The introduction of the ERP to the existing setup required oecumenical study, lot of changes and reengineering to the existing processes. Actually this can be considered as one of the major revolutions which Singer has gone through the short history which is less than two decades. The senior management view ERP as an IT system alternatively IS. The main suit was nobody precious to understand the difference betwe en IS IT, or even nobody realized these are two different things and ERP instruction execution is an IS project not an IT alone. The best usage of ignorance of IS aspect is throughout the revolutions of the organization structures at Singer they have not thought of IS managers, only about IT managers. There has not been a job description of an IS manager nor the IS functions inside IT manager. It is essential to look at any IT related changes to be done to the organization in an IS perspective. Since the senior management identified ERP capital punishment as an IT task, they did not thought it about on the IS perspective. thence the ERP implementation aggroup was formed as an IT team.The attitude toward ERP from the middle management and rest of the organization was in the negative side at the initial phase. They go out ERP as a tool which will be introduced by senior management with the support of IT team to find the mistakes and audit individuals on their deliverables. Fo r an example warehouse managers saw ERP as a watch dog who can report the inefficiencies of the warehouse. He never understood ERP as a tool which can increase his efficiency. The job is not with either the managers or ERP, it is due to the human nature. As human beings anybody does not like to change, there is an integral resistance for change. Therefore it is the duty of the steering committee to make the environment and culture where employees are ready for change. This is nothing related IT, but its in all related to the IS. Simply the attitude should be changed slowly where employees will say yes we need the change.One major reason for not doing proper change preparation was the strict timeline for the ERP implementation. Thus some of the key aspects of IS has been ignored. It is a known fact that sometimes we need to do the changes gradually, when the resistance is high. Therefore this could have been a good strategy if Singer ERP implementation was initially well planned a nd introduced as a gradual change. Even though the ERP implementation went with a rapid phase it was 50% successful at the first attempt because of the visionary leadership of the chairman Mr. Hemaka Amarasooriya.The formation of the ERP implementation was done with the majority of IT personnel but with the presence of representatives of key divisions. At this dot most of the middle managers did not treat this seriously and they asked somebody from his/her division in the ERP team, but the member was frequently changed when divisional workload increases. Thus there were no dedicated representatives from key departments. On the other hand middle managers do not involve in reviewing the progress. come along in 2005 Singer did not have well defined and documented processes to handle the day to day work. The general operative culture was heavily depending on the manager of the division. There were lots of emplacemental decisions taken by the managers with the gut smell and most of the time they worked fine. last what happened was the existing process was not exhaustively studied by the ERP team and they came up with an inappropriate reengineering plan to fit ERP into Singer processes. In a nutshell, this plan was not to customize the ERP into the Singer culture, but to customize Singer culture in such a way that it will fit ERP general template. For an example if we compare the finished goods delivery for a particular location, previously it was approved by the district managers or area managers. At that point they decide exact touchstone to go there and make the delivery note for the ware house team. Then if the goods are available they will directly deliver them and sleep together the originator. If the products are not available warehouse will contact the requester and ask for a modification with available types of products. Sometimes this make the things to get hold up but good situational decisions were possible. When this process was cutover to the ERP, the process was modified. The new request was to be selected among pre defined product sets. Therefore if any single product was short, system will not allow to select that template and choose an identical to unavailable product from the list. This became a big restriction for day to day operation, because in majority of the cases people were used to do customization according to the situation and send the goods to the shops. Eventually the efficiency achieved by integrating warehouse and material planning is of no use due to the restrictions which were not thought of at the planning stage. Even though the above discussed example is related to product delivery similar examples are spreaded across the company with the ERP implementation. The major reason for this was lack of the support given by experienced staff when the ERP implementation was planned.The ERP implementation at Singer in year 2005 was an exercise of more than 2 years, but not fully bad experience even there wer e highly impacted cases. The finance department got much enhancement for their day to day operations because almost the entire business was inter machine-accessible compared to previous individual MIS run at individual departments. For an example the finance manager can get an entire view on the fiscal status online and drill down to micro detail for analysis purposes. Further the documentation work of the ware house material ordering departments were cut back immensely. Because prior to ERP the same information which was entered in different systems at different departments. Sometimes due to mistakes the same information recorded by two departments was not identical. Since ERP integrated all the departments via the processes, information was accurate and available online.Even though ERP was took the cold start and kept on moving with day to day work, Singer did not stop the previous systems overnight. It was like a parallel operation of the previous systems and ERP. This was a ve ry good decision, because differently there could have been a significant impact and delays due to the initial problems ERP faced. At the ground level running ERP had lot of operational issues because the existing systems were not studied properly and necessary reengineering was not done.The next biggest problem was the real users of ERP were not feeding the accurate data in to the ERP system. This was mainly due to the culture which was established in the lower levels of the company. Majority was enkindle in doing the job properly, but hated the documentation work. Thus they entered some data for the sake of completion this was severe because the initial ERP system was not equipped with proper data validation mechanisms. Again this was not a confinesation of ERP it was an issue of customization and implementation. For an example when issuing products for a new location (shop), there was a requirement to fill something in the location/shop name field. So the person who is issuing the delivery note just enters some word as the location/shop name. Therefore for the financial department it would be like junk information, because they cannot perform the assets capitalization at shop level. After few month of the operation this problem was observe and resulted in doing an audit on the entire network on the shop level. Plenty of money was spent on this audit just to adjust some mistake which were not anticipated at the beginning due to tight time schedule.After running ERP for about six months all the people began to realize that ERP implementation have lot of problems than expected. The employees from the bottom was complain and raising the voice that the ERP is not functioning properly and signs of failures of entire system were popping out, since ERP is the only integrated system running in Singer. For an example in first quarter of 2007 employees freely express their views to senior management on the problems of ERP. These motivated the senior management to take the bottom up approach and relook at the ERP again.Eventually management took a serious chit-chat and formed cross functional teams (CFT) to find the problems in ERP and iron them out. This was initiated in second quarter of 2007 and given a time line of 12 months. More importantly real hard users of ERP was put into the CFTs and take out all the issues of the system. Then there was an ERP consultant in each CFT, who has to shape the issues with the agreement of the team. Finally the CFT has to certify and sign off there are no more identified issues in the ERP. This became a fruit full exercise due to following reasons,Actual users became a part of the team who studied the issues in the system.Each CFT was equipped with ERP consultantIT department contend the role of IS with the support of all the divisionsSenior management support and advocateLast but not least attitude of the organization was to straighten out whatever issues with ERP and move forward to face the compe tition.Finally after about 2 years of period Singer was able to make ERP a success. In any successful project there is plenty of way for improvement, thus that global rule applies to Singer ERP as well. For an example presently the ERP operates as an internal system, but the capability of ERP is far beyond.The present bring out chain should be extended to include the suppliers, distributors and business partners, though internet to guarantee a smoother process of ordering and purchasing of goods with stripped-down time-to-market, stock holdings, less problems. Singer should improve and use the present ERP system to access suppliers and distributors stock databases on-line and in real time to check stock levels. There should be information integration, planning synchronization and work flow coordination to achieve this goal. With a fully fledged SCM and close cooperation with the each organization in the supply chain will add value, reduce costs, improve flexibility and increase r esponsiveness of Singer.Information Systems In The gentleman Resource DepartmentOne can ask why we need IS for the HR department, but actually IS can improve the HR department functions extensively in a large organization like Singer. Human Resource Management Information Management System is vital organization, where manual record keeping is an inefficient task. For an example let us come back the method of sending birthday greeting to employees. If the data was not available in the computer and it is in the ad hominem files clerk or subordinate should routinely check for the upcoming birthdays and trigger the sending of birth day card. But thank to computers every morning there is a pop up with the names of the birthday celebrities. At Singer, its HRIS basically performs three services, demean keeping parallel to the traditional method of keeping hardcopies in the personal file, all the information is fed to HR database. This database is share in the intranet at different ac cess security levels. For an example the basic information is shared among everybody, but personal and HR specific data are curb to selected HR personnel. Even though IT is used for record keeping it can be seen that the work is duplicated by keeping hard copies too. Thus it is recommended to limit the hardcopy based record keeping to the documents which have a legal requirement. other than the IT use is not optimized in the aspect of record keeping.Facilitating human resource operations Thanks to the HRIS majority of the HR operations are computerized. For example staff recruitment, attendance and leave recording, linking up with payroll, performance appraisal, training management are done using the HR penetration, and this saves a lot of time. HRIS is cordial to any staff in the company. Staff performs all their administrative requests via the HRIS portal and the relevant supervisor can approve or reject the relevant request from the system itself. There will be automatic emai l alerts sent to relevant parties by HRIS, if any task is pending to be performed by a person. Therefore HRIS is linked with the exchange server of the organization to facilitate this feature. Staff personnel file details are scanned and stored securely, in addition to the hard copies for back-up and easy retrieval purposes. Payroll system is connected to the HRIS to minimize intermediate human intervention. The human resource management can retrieve customized reports from HRIS such as, division wise staff attendance, overall working hours, division/ unit wise performance etc.Reporting for management decision fashioning Since the entire aspects of HR is computerized, it is very easy to do data mining and come of with summaries which will ease the decision making with quantitative figures. The cost reduction Initiatives Company has implemented in the recent past has been taken with the support of HRIS data. Another important support HR got by means of IT was implementing the force d ranking performance appraisal. Since 2006 Singer was difficult to implement the forced ranking in the annual performance evaluation. This was initiated to make sure the best performers will be filtered and top percentage will be rewarded. The majority of the company did not like this bell curve method because it can deteriorate the team culture, but the management wanted to implement this and the HR was trying hard. Somehow the exceptional performance of the company made HR to deviate from the forced bell curve. The major reason was the power and politics of the line managers. For an example the line manager who was doing the performance evaluation ranked everybody in his team with A+, for a year he has achieved targets exceptionally. After couple of rounds of discussions HR changes their mind and agree with the line manager. Therefore consecutive two years of failure on implementation of bell curve based ranking, HR decided to get the support of IT. IT modified the existing HRIS in such a way that a single manager cannot submit his evaluation on his team if he does not adhere to the bell curve. With this manager was not supposed to mark A+, A, B, C D they had to give marks out of 100, but cannot give identical marks. Then the system will rank them accordingly. So one can give almost 99% to all employees, but system will rank using the differences in decimal places.Eventually in 2008 HR was able to implemented to bell curve based ranking in reality without going for personal level arguments with managers, because they used the IS effectively.IDENTIFICATION OF GAPSThe information systems (IS) at Singer can be identified from the functional perspective based on the major business functions of sales and marketing, manufacturing and production, finance and accounting and human resources. As illustrated by the following diagram, the IS serve the three different levels of the organization i.e. operational level, management level and strategic level.IS at Operat ional LevelThe operational level systems support operational managers in monitoring the daily activities and transactions of the business. At Singer, the sales and marketing function at operational level is supported by four information systems. The order processing, is mainly related to sales and billing at Singer. The material movement control under manufacturing and control is done using ERP System (e.g. Material Master and Plant Maintenance modules). ERP accounting system at Singer enhances the financing and accounting function by introduce the flow of funds in the firm through transactions such as paychecks, payments to vendors, securities reports and receipts. The operational management of Si