The History Of The Broadway Cafe

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Our business, Broadway Café, has recently included new sales in items such as, customized CDs, customizable coffee presses, and coffee-of-the-month and tea-of-the-month programs. Unfortunately, every time we introduce a new product we must also create a new system to track those sales. Every type of product in our inventory is tracked using separate, individual tracking systems. Each system operates independently of the others to perform the tasks of creating, updating and maintaining sales information. It did not take very long to recognize that having separate systems for each different business line would harm our business. However, we are saddled with this inadequate accounting system until we can replace it. We obviously need to find a way to integrate all of our systems and this can be accomplished by implementing the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

If we cannot find a way to correlate the details of each system, inconsistencies will begin to occur throughout the business causing business operations to become irregular and unpredictable. Additionally, the ability to permit successful planning, to control resources and to make and deliver goods and services will be greatly hindered. When information in one business system is changed, the same information in the other business systems cannot be automatically updated. Without correlation of the systems, delays with inventory, sales and invoicing will occur. There will eventually be a decline in communication and customer service. Unsatisfied customers will result in a decline of profits.

Using separate systems for every business line could damage marketing campaigns. Sales could be loss because of the inability to obtain correct information when there is a need to market "hot" products. Without the ability to see real time views of the business, we lose the capability to make valid decisions regarding marketing techniques and to know which marketing aspects are working or which ones are not. The inconsistencies may provide inaccurate information regarding the marketing campaigns that may skew the results. For instance, if the system count of the inventory items is incorrect the available quantities could also be inaccurate, thus the product that is advertised may actually be unavailable. Incorrect inventory data could result in losing sales as well as customers. Separate systems prohibit employees in different departments from knowing information found in another department. An employee may be prevented from offering some type of promotion because they do not have immediate access to the marketing campaigns that may be in effect. Separate systems may cause the campaign data to lose its integrity. As an example, if a customer purchase a customized CD, the customer would be entitled to receive a coupon that gives a discount on a coffee press. With separate systems there is no way to report it correctly.

Having silos of information could also hinder marketing. Silos of information or the "silo effect" in business means that there is a lack of communication and there is no cross-departmental support being given. Departments work only on their own specific goals and ignore the needs of the other departments and information (along with customers) get lost in the middle of all the information. In a small business such as Broadway Café, not having coordination and integration of all our marketing methods so that they support each other to allow the customer to continue to move through the marketing system can harm the marketing campaign. It does not allow for the creation of any sort of marketing network of methods. Unecessary silos of information can prevent the flow of information

If the Broadway Café continues to run the business using separate systems, we will begin to encounter several undesirable issues. (1) Each individual system would require individual backup systems requiring more time and resources. (2) Continuing to use separate systems would keep the Café from gaining and/or maintaining a competitive advantage with other similar businesses. (3) Employees in different departments must wait to receive information manually from another department before the employee can complete his/her portion of a particular task when the particular functions overlap, which is extremely inefficient. (4) Duplication errors could exist because of redundancy throughout the different systems. Also, the omission of information from one system could result in system information to be out of balance in another. (5) Employees are required to manually enforce the data relationship between all the departments resulting in wasteful resources and lower productivity. (6) There is a loss of internal controls because there is no method to view information across other departments. Although the data is maintained separately, the information is needed by other departments. (7) Increased man hours are involved using separate systems for each business line. There will be increased cost and time in maintaining separate systems for each business line, which could eventually override the cost of implementing ERP. (8) Using several different systems that do not interact will create large amounts of information silos; there will be large amounts of data with no way to determine what the overlaps are. (9) Although separating each product system may provide the ability to see a short-term view of a given product, it does not allow management to see an overall view of the business that will allow us to see where Broadway Café has been, where it is, or where it is going. (10) Reporting information can be obtained for individual business lines, but there is no systems that can correlate the business lines to provide reporting information that can encompass the overall information for all the business lines to view growth or lack thereof for the Broadway Café. Thus, the ability to make strategic business decisions is severely hindered.

ERP is a process that businesses use to manage and join together the important parts of the business such as, the departments and functions within the business into one information technology system. The ERP management information system can integrate areas such as planning, purchasing, inventory, sales, marketing, finance, human resources, and more. ERP can be considered the tie that connects the different computer systems for an organization. With ERP, each department can continue to have their own system, but they can communicate and share information easier with other departments within the business. The ERP system takes the data from all departments and functions and correlates it and generates reporting information that details the entire organization in addition to individual departs. It is a central system that gathers all the transactional data from the operational systems of the entire business.

The core aspects of ERP are accounting and finance, production and materials management and human resources. There are also extended aspects of business intelligence, customer relationship management, supply chain management and E-business.

The biggest disadvantage of ERP is the cost. ERP is expensive to purchase, expensive to implement and expensive to maintain. It also changes the entire way that a business operates. This requires employees to have to change and learn a whole do way of doing business. Management will need to fully assess the business needs to be able to choose the right ERP system and try to avoid too much change too quickly.

We need to understand that there is more to it than just going live with the system. We need to remember to not treat the implementation of the system as just a technical project, but to understand that it is a change that will balance people, processes and technology.

Even if we determine that the Broadway Café cannot meet the expense of implementing the ERP system, we still need to consider integrating our individual systems to avoid the pitfalls that will surely arise if we continue to use separate systems for individual business lines. We will need to develop one network that will incorporate all departments to allow workstations to communicate with each other based on the employee positions and authorized access accordingly. Without making some kind of change, Braodway Café will surely fail.