Sunday, July 6, 2014

New Enhanced POS System For Zara

Dear Mr. Salgado and Mr. Sánchez,

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to sit in on the presentation given to us by the hired consultants.  It was a very significant presentation in order to help us make our decision on whether or not to implement a new OS system, or to remain with what we currently have.  With my absence at today’s meeting, I would like to present to you my takeaways and personal opinion on the matter.

The consultant’s recommendation is to implement a new Enhanced POS system.  They were able to show the benefits of such enhancement with visual and easily followed aids.  We were able to see that new Enhanced POS, would allow for the store employees to easily upload all the days’ sales from each individual cash register instantly and not have to go through the whole process of saving it on a DOS.  As per the consultants, this will help us manage our internal data efficiently and provide Zara with additional information on its customers, which could be useful for the Marketing Department allowing them to send out advertisement.

The benefits put forward with the new Enhance POS system will allow Zara to continuously update the system with new upgrades as they come along.  The synching of tablets, for the store managers, and the POS systems will be a great future upgrade but to get there we must implement the Enhanced POS system first. Costs associated to this upgrade will be very high for Zara, which the consultants pointed out very well.  However, they did not provide a better solution on how to implement this which is why I believe this can be done with a very well thought out plan.

If Zara were to begin testing using the internal IT personnel, a better idea of how long it would take and how costly it would be, could be achieved.  With this, planning would be simpler as this could possibly be done in phases.  The first phase could be to implement the new POS system in a few local stores, this would allow for testing and the closeness of the stores to the IT department will be beneficial in monitoring the implementation.  Second phase would consist of the implementation being done on a regional level, by performing the updates one region at a time and allowing for the stores to adapt to the new system.  With this, countries could be targeted next, until every store is in sync with the new system.  Which will then allow them to communicate with each other in order to fill the customer needs if a certain item is available at a different store, they could request that store to send it to them. 

I am not saying that this will be a quick and smooth implementation.  We will definitely encounter roadblocks on the way but it is achievable.  Estimated time frame for implementation would be 2 to 4 years, but if Zara does not want to find itself stuck in a situation where new stores cannot be opened due to its current POS manufacture terminating production, this will have to be done.

With this, I thank you for reading over my takeaways and would like to apologize for my absence today.

If there are any further questions, please feel free to contact me as I will be more than happy to answer them.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Couto

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