Information Technology Enterprise Architecture was effectively used in Dairy Farm Group Company. The Company applied all the necessary information technology requirements to boost its business operations and processes to gain a competitive advantage. Having LAN (local area network) for every single store system inside the Company was a positive move and a business strategy too. The technologies used in the different stores helped this company to conduct its business operations efficiently. The systems in these individual stores were well developed and designed in a way that every employee accessed the information the respective stores. Moreover, the systems were well customized to allow them to solve the specific problems of the individual stores and provide optimal solutions.
Another application of the Information Technology architecture in this Company was on the operational systems that were installed in different departments to serve the needs of the customers and employees. These systems were mainly meant to support and automate the DFG’s operations to achieve accuracy and speed in service delivery to the customers and management. Systems like the inventory management, accounting system, warehouse, and distribution management system served very well and gave an upper hand to this Company to improve their profit margins and also gained a significant competitive advantage. Due to their large size nature, the operations systems were able to accommodate a huge load of daily transactional data, product details, and customer information in case of a purchase.
Both systems in this Company were effective towards solving the specific business problems in every respective store and department. They helped the employees to serve more customers with less time and with a high level of accuracy. Effectiveness was that through the adoption of the Information Technology architecture, DFG Company managed to re-engineer its business processes and strategies to respond to the high completion within the Asia-pacific continent. As a result, this Company improved its sales, profit margins, competitive advantage, and its customer base also increased. Having all the financial records centralized helped the management to have a great time to analyze and make sound financial and non-financial decisions.
Lastly, Information Technology architecture was effective through updating and integrating the systems to share data among the staff. Moreover, the provision of remote access to the customers enabled them to increase the volume of the customer base and improved their sales volume too. The remote access helped the company to serve customers from different locations simultaneously and have the product delivered to their respective regions. Through these online services via the customized website, the customers and employees enjoyed remote purchases and help reduce the long chains and waiting time in the company.
However, the Company should have done a few things that are of help to their business operations and processes. These things comprise of technology applications and other strategic moves in the business. Integrating the single store systems so that they communicate with each other could embrace data sharing among the stores. Information like stock levels, price shifts, and supplier’s delay is vital and therefore, real-time sharing could be more effective. Another advantage of integrating these systems is that in the failure of a single system, the respective store could use another system to monitor their remote and still serve the customers.
Having centralized suppliers for the same products could help the company to have the same prices for the same products rather than experiencing huge price fluctuations due to different multiple suppliers who supply similar with different prices. By having rhyming prices for the same product would improve the rate of customer retention due to the price stability factor. This business strategy could enable this Company to increase its customer base and hence improve the profit margin. Lastly, DFG Company could have implemented personal sales to the new regions to gain new customers and give much knowledge about their products and company at large.
There are a few lessons learned from this case scenario. One of them is that for a company to have a significant competitive advantage in the market, it needs to respond to the changing market trends through re-engineering their business operations and processes. The re-engineering process could be through adopting different technological strategies like implementing a new advanced system and other supportive business technology applications. Another step could be through changing the business processes to be integrated processes and concentrate on the process rather than concentrating on the output. By looking at concentrating on the business process means focusing on the quality of the output.
In conclusion, top management involvement in strategic adoption is among the lessons learned as it enables the new system to have full support from the management. When the management provides full support to a re-engineered business process/operation, it will have a high chance of being successful in the market. DFG Company involved top management when changing the business strategy to respond to the changing market trends from competitors and the economy itself. As a result, it became successful and gained a very significant competitive advantage over their competitors. All the stated lessons are the key factors that enabled DFG Company to change its service provision to the customers and hence improved their brand name in the market.