The company has to contend with, to name just a few, supermarkets, retailers, franchisers, shipping organizations, bottling plants, cup distributors, equipment and manufacturing facilities, printers, tax officials, farmers, investors, and at times whole nations. For these massive operations, the company has instituted the heavy firepower from Hewlett Packard and Oracle for their mainframe and database needs. But the company has a global operation and each local facility may have a totally different tool based on local vendors and contracts. The company has always been very progressive with its data management. "Starbucks is considering networking home offices with Wi-Fi technology, too. "We're trying to lower our infrastructure costs in field offices," says James Snook, Starbucks' VP of it and enterprise architecture. "If you need to tear out or change a network setup, you can reconfigure quickly with wireless." (George, 2003) This database management technology will allow Starbucks district managers to have access to a myriad of job-related data via wireless-enabled notebook computers. The company needs it management to be able to spend as much time as possible with individual store managers and customers and this new database technology will giving them access to corporate information while on the road. "Of course, database marketing in any form raises the specter of potential abuses and invasions of privacy....

Many companies, once they've captured information about their customers, turn around and market those lists to third parties. However, foodservice operators know they must be cautious because they're dealing with their best customers." (Mehegan, 1995)
In conclusion, all organizations must keep track data such as payroll, inventory, or even seating charts so as to be as an efficient an organization as possible. Because Starbucks is no exception, this report was about Starbucks Corporation and how they manage their data. The report also tried to focus on the fact that the company uses Microsoft Excel and if so, some of the ways the software package is used. In addition, Starbucks must maintain a great deal of information so what other database software do they use and finally, the report tried to assess the current use of data to see if the company could manage it better.

References

George, Tischelle (2003). Starbucks' Data to Go; Coffee Company's Managers Are Getting Business Data Using Stores' Wi-Fi Networks. InformationWeek 1/17/2003.

Mehegan, Sean (1995). The Database Game: Actually, it's Not a Game at All. Database Marketing Can Help You Sell More Product Than You Do Now. Restaurant Business, 9/1/1995.

Starbucks.com. (2004). Starbucks.com. Retrieved on November 6, 2004, at http://www.starbucks.com/default.asp?cookie%5Ftest=1

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