My dad owns a small grocery business in Plaquemine, LA. He like many other independent retailers, are part of a larger conglomeration of retailers that purchase product through a distributor, essentially. Until now, my father has relied on old school methods of business...simple adding machine, paper charge accounts, etc to get him through. I have been trying to convince him to shift to a POS system that tracks sales, credits and inventory.
His distributor provides such a service. It syncs his store system to the warehouse system, allowing him to search for trends and do automatic reorders, track inventory and look up many items and price changes at the drop of a hat. It is an integration of supply chain management, a system that he can outsource to his distributor, and the IT department will make sure that it runs efficiently and smoothly.
This Cadillac system with the bells and whistles comes at a steep price. For my father's purposes, it may be beneficial to input a system that is much simpler and does not come with the fancy add-ons that the distribution system provides. He can essentially put the same system in at a fraction of the cost, and it all runs on equipment that is user-friendly, which means that I could be his IT department.
Not sure which way he will turn, but sometimes as we learned in class, outsourcing for the bigger options is not always the right idea.
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