Operations Management
Alliance Supermarket Case Study
Point of sale (PoS) systems that is able to accurately track sales using universal product codes (UPC) has the potential to improve service and reduce costs. If the system was further adjusted, there would also be the potential to collect information on individual customers which would allow Alliance Supermarket to adopt some new, and potentially valuable, strategies.
Reducing Costs and Improving Service
The PoS system allows Alliance Supermarket to gather detailed information on sales patterns, looking not only at what level of goods are sold, but also when. This can be very useful for inventory control, as it may help the firm to gain information which may be used to better manage inventory, especially in terms of forecasting for future inventory needs.
Accurate forecasting may help to reduce...
If a firm knows which days of the week they sell the most, and which days they sell the least, as well as using longer term data, they may manage the inventory more effectively to reduce waste. For example, the firm may sell more milk on a Monday than a Tuesday, so when ordering the milk they will make sure there is a lower inventory on the Tuesday, this may reduce the level of wastage. This can be repeated throughout the store. Data gathered from the system may also be used to assess the influences of other variables such as seasons and the weather, such as the degree to which candy sales increase before Valentines Day and Halloween, or the degree to which soup sales increase in cold weather and ice-cream sales increase in hot weather. Other influences that may be…
