Group Report

Case study on information system of Fibre Fashion

Your Name

Fibre Fashion
Date
Table of Contents

Introduction...............................................................................................................................................................3
Identifying issue with current Information System.......................................................................................3
Literature review .....................................................................................................................................................4
Excel and Data Quality..........................................................................................................................................4
Excel and Data Analysis.......................................................................................................................................5
Cost of Excel based Information system...........................................................................................................6
Database.....................................................................................................................................................................7
Recommended Solution.........................................................................................................................................8
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................................................8
References..................................................................................................................................................................9
Appendix A- Scrum Meeting...............................................................................................................................11
Introduction

Small business are the thrive and liveliness in the economics of a country, new start-ups
with new ideas and that is the reason why SMEs can grab the attention of its audiences
efficiently. In a report it was said that SMEs contributed 44 percent of the total economic
activities in the US with the provision of two-third of the new net jobs. After all this good
news there is an alarming situation as well for these businesses is that GDP share has fallen
from 48.0 to 43.5 percent while for new SMEs GDP is increasing 1.4 percent annually and
large business 2.5 percent annually [ CITATION Dor19 \l 1033 ]. In this statement, it can be seen
SMEs are not only competing against the mainstream businesses but also alike ones too.
Hence for your business to flourish in this competitive market, the first step is to have a
manageable system.

Manageable system include primary activities and support activities. According to Thimothy
(2018), If a company have a budget to improve its system, the priority should be given to
sales and marketing. The sales and marketing is crucial because it helps to connect to
customers, build a network in the market which creates a sustainable business and boost up
sales, which generates revenue for the company [ CITATION Sim13 \l 1033 ]. The first step to
improve this side of a company is to manage its data or information. Information must be
organized to extract the useful data easily with less prone to error and must be protected.
On average a data breach can cost a company £3100, which for a SME can become a never-
reopen situation [ CITATION Bed18 \l 1033 ]. Likewise, huge business have strong protected
system this can be a case for SME as well.

Identifying issue with current Information System

The current structure of the Fibre Fashion involves excel sheet and a database. Database
stores the information of customers, transactions, orders, and cost of goods, while excel
contains the data related to retailers, their sale figures, location, and the current statuses
with them.

Overall, looking at the excel sheet the first thing to notice is the inconsistency of data and
format. In the sale figure there are empty cell while a few has 0 or even hyphen in it. Then
the blue color key represent placed then cancelled and yet there are still sale figure in that
collection of the store which is being accumulated at the end in the total. This shows even
the quantitative data about the total sales at the end is calculated wrong. Fibre fashion
stores sales per brand on their excel sheet but according to the current spreadsheet the sale
figures are according to per collection not brand. So, the qualitative data about which brand
has the most sales hence more popular cannot be analyze. These are few issues out of
many. In general, the spreadsheet is inconsistent and inefficient with respect to Fibre
Fashion, the qualitative and quantitative data cannot be analyzed with this data.

Moreover, current database shows that database is not normalized. There are redundant
data along with multi-value data, empty cell, functional dependencies, and anomalies. Such
as in customer table they may store same customer whenever they purchase from Fibre
leading to redundancy and field state also have repeating values. In the transaction table
there exist no key such primary, super or candidate key. In the order table the there are
many repeated data along a field. The cost of a good or price of a product cannot be
identified. This all lead to misinterpretation and loss of useful data for a company.

Both database and excel have few things is common such as being inefficient, have poor quality
data and improper data entry which makes this system as a bad marketing information system.
Despite all the problems with your current marketing information tools, is it good to use excel
for sales and marketing or are there any other alternative for a SME?

Literature Review

Microsoft Excel have been around since 1985 and have no doubt been a revolutionary tool
for corporations since then [ CITATION Ros19 \l 1033 ]. But likewise, in this field of Internet
technology nothing is bound to be permanent and are in constant competition with another
tool alike. Since then it has been a controversial topic among the marketing data analytics,
but according to Rosenburg (2019) excel still exists and is not going anywhere soon. This
software is used for data analytics, forecasting, calculation and analyzing and it can be used
as an embedded system or independently as well. It takes advantage of Microsoft’s
different technologies such as OLE (Object linking and embedding), ODBC (Open Database
Connectivity), DAO (Data Access Object) and plug and play [ CITATION RUS98 \l 1033 ].

The fame of this tool came from its perspective that it can do anything. It is being used for
finance and accounting, marketing and product management, human resourcing and
planning etc. Microsoft Excel is a powerful tool, but it cannot stand alone [ CITATION Ros19 \l
1033 ]. Hence, this is where the controversy arrives because managing data in excel can be
tricky, but is it worth it for Fibre Fashion?

Excel and Data quality

Data quality refers to many customized dimensions or it can be said that the data is high
quality if it can be used for a desired purpose and is error free and have some desired
characteristics. These characteristics includes the ease of interpreting, the usefulness or
relevance if they are accurate and consistent. The main components of data quality are
accuracy, completeness and consistency. Accuracy refers to as error free such as wrong
spelling or an unacceptable value in the data field. Completeness refers to as scheming of
data as if there are all entities, within rows data are not missing and along the column field.
In this part the problems such as sampling of data and values missing are the most
common. Then comes the consistency which deal with validation and checks on the data,
such as children cannot be older than their parents [ CITATION Bab11 \l 1033 ].

Data consistency control is a central component of the overall data control process, and
attempts to increase data security are also closely related to data governance systems that
aim to ensure data is correctly structured and used within an enterprise ( Rouse, 2019).
Bad data alone can cost companies on average $15 million per annum (Grow, 2019). So,
data quality leads to marketing information system to be efficient and this is the first step
that Fibre Fashion must do with their data too.

Is excel a correct tool to check for data quality? The answer to this is that it depends,
according to Albright (2017), if done properly it can be very handy otherwise it can become
nearly impossible to interpret any data. Excel requires some special care for it to hold a
good quality data. According to Bhalai & Pawlik (2016), If the sheet has well-structured
table so simple techniques such as prior to entering data which assures quality and after
entering data which controls quality need to be implemented. Excel does have features
such as validation along the column, pivot tables which is used as an organizer of data and
many more.

Despite the features provided by excel yet still it does not fall into a great marketing
information system tool for enterprises. According to Hermans (2013), the taxonomy of
spreadsheet seven audits were studied and out of which 87% of the spreadsheets still had
errors in them. The underlying problem of this is that design of the spreadsheet which
consist of formulas and worksheets are hidden. The main errors are categorized into
qualitative errors are when there is inaccuracy in adding data which leads to quantitative
errors as the value calculated is wrong. These errors resulted from mechanical or manual
error as spreadsheet involves manual entering of data, logical errors – if a wrong formula
of an algorithm is applied and omission error because spreadsheet requires high level data
modelling and planning.

For Fibre fashion if excel is to be used for sale and marketing department, it is necessary to
hire someone who is an expert of excel as it is a handful tool but with a great learning
curve.

Excel and Data Analysis

After the data quality controls comes the use of data for sales and marketing strategies. For
this section, the assumption is that there already exists a spreadsheet of high-quality data
model over which data analysis will be performed for marketing decision making,
compared to other tool such as databases where do excel stands.

Data analytics is the use of data in a way to understand that what a company need to
survive in this competitive market by making strategic decisions (Michigan State
University, 2019). These decisions lead to more profit by targeted advertising and knowing
the current consumer market needs. These data analytics are use in marketing for knowing
the consumer specific strategies based on demographic and now more recently the clicks of
a viewer in counted then the search-engine advertisement is promoted which increases
sales. In sales this analysis helps with pricing strategies, consumer feedback, public
engagement with brand and product success over time. This is the reason sales and
marketing involves lots of decision making and it is still growing in the businesses, this is
also the reason why e-commerce have flourished based on the articles of Michigan State
University (2019) and McKinsey&Company (2015).

Excel may not exactly be a tool for data analysis, but it does not mean that it cannot be used
as one. In fact, it supports many features which allow the user to draw conclusions or
results upon which further decision making can be done [ CITATION Alb17 \l 1033 ]. One such
feature of excel is that of a pivot table, which allows the user to analyse large sets of data
and to understand and recognize patterns in the data set. A Pivot Table helps you to
compile data from data contained in another spreadsheet or chart, as percentages,
averages or counts in Excel. It's perfect for easy report building because you can easily
filter and visualize the data swiftly based on Singh (2020) and Bose (2018). Besides pivot
tables, excel also features several other capabilities which allow to further make the data
provided more meaningful such as data reporting and data visualization to observe trends
by using Sparkline. Furthermore data reporting can be done in order to obtain a final
product, a conclusive report including charts and figures, upon which much needed
perspective can be made apparent for future decisions; for example forecasting the success
of a product based upon region [ CITATION Bos181 \l 1033 ].

Within Excel, already many features are present in order to perform the tasks required by
these organizations. According to Bose (2018), excel have features such as color marker,
formatting, charts, tables, sparklines and many more. These features helps in visual
representation of the result after performing data analysis. However, in some minor cases
further tools might be required to make the data meaningful, and in order to do so external
Excel add-in can be used to get even more functionality such as that of “Data Analysis Tool
Pak”. Using this, a lot of statistical manipulation can be done like regression, t-test, chi-test,
correlation, etc. So, in this manner Excel can be utilized to the best of its ability [ CITATION
Alb17 \l 1033 ].

Cost for Excel based Information System

The cost comparison for any SME is important and especially not only the initial cost the
regulatory cost along with management. In this section, the extra cost that can come along
due to any anomalies is not considered.

Before diving into the actual cost of this information system consisting only of Excel, the
consideration should be given to currently what proportion of SMEs are using which tool.
According to US the business which generates less than $25 million revenue, 59% uses
Microsoft Excel, Oracle, SAP and IBM is used by 1% each, 11% uses self-developed
software, 10% does not uses any and 17% uses other. These statistics clearly show that
Excel is popular among SMEs. But the usage of Excel is decreasing as other tools such as
ERP software are becoming more accessible [ CITATION Sin20 \l 1033 ].

Microsoft have three different packages for business, and this includes their MS Office 365
complete products such as word, excel, access, etc. The best package is worth £15.10 user
per month, and this includes all their services such mobile and web versions, email and
calendaring and many more. The other two packages are standard and basic, and they are
priced at £9.40 and £3.80 user per month, respectively. Only apps-based service is rated at
£7.90 user per month [ CITATION Mic20 \l 1033 ]. Now to consider these pricing on per user and
monthly based. On average a SME has 20-99 employees with revenue less than
$50,000[CITATION Sma15 \l 1033 ]. Calculating the premium package for 20 employees will cost
£320 per month. If hiring a professional excel sheet expert the starting cost if from $2042
and average is $3968 [ CITATION Zip20 \l 1033 ]. The entire setup of marketing information
system on basis of can cost minimum of $3000 per month. This does not include the cost of
special assistance such data breach or organizing data overall and data sampling.

Databases

Spreadsheets and directories can function only for the smaller enterprises. If the company
becomes too vast to hold documents in any reliable way, it is time to employ a service to
build databases. A database stores and maintains all the relevant details for the business in
one location. It can be used for contrasting data sets and for generating custom reports
(CostOwl, 2020). According to Scheppingen (2017) to setup a database, it consists of 4
primary steps and costs in the process which are:
1. Planning – First the requirements and design of the database are planned according to
how the organizer wants to access the data. This stage has a variable cost and depends
upon both parties involved, normally costing the developer around $50 per hour.
2. Acquiring – Second step is to acquire the hardware and software to implement the
database. This includes the server cost as well if the organization requires it and the price
can go up to $25,000.
3. Deploying – the hardware is setup using the support of the technical team.
4. Maintenance – As time passes, some issues in the database can arise. Such as hardware
faults, so parts may have to be replaced or if some adjustment is required in the database to
meet a specific need so that can be catered in this category.

Software’s used for database creation and management such as Oracle, allow for data
quality/integrity control while data entry is being done into the database. According to
Oracle (2013) Library this can be done by employing some of the features such as that of
static control. Static control implies that some constraints are used to verify the integrity of
your application data, this process allows the user to improve data quality by defining
further constraints and to perform validations directly on existing data. The information
systems which are affected by processes of transformation and incorporation also enforce
their own declarative guidelines.
The main benefits of employing such data validation are the following:
 Increased profitability by the usage of target database throughout its entire life
cycle. Violations of industry standards throughout the data slow down computer
processing over the life cycle of the target database
 Validation of layout of target database model. The observed rule violations do not
necessarily mean an inadequate quality of the source results. It can reveal some
degree of incompleteness in the target model. Before an application is revamped,
 data can be migrated to verify a new data model while providing a test database in
line with reality.

Ensuring integrity of the data is not always an easy job. Indeed, it requires removal and
redistribution of any data that breaks declarative rules. This implies the implementation of
complex programming, especially when a method for checking integrity constraints is
implemented in the target database [ CITATION Ora13 \l 1033 ].

Recommended Solution

Should Fibre Fashion should consider their marketing information system completely
based on Microsoft Excel? Yes, they can as excel can have a good impact on this system by
maintaining a good quality data and performing the data analytics to figure out how to
increase their sales. But the condition to this always narrows down to one restriction that
is to have a good quality data and this will depend on corporation to corporation. Along
with good quality there should be a complete backup system too in case of data losses.
Excel can be used as a database too for Fibre Fashion as the data until now is not
categorized into big data or requires a relational database model. This is cost effective as
well for a SME and as every company must apply the 5% rule to their marketing
department. It is recommended to hire someone who is an expert on expert.

Conclusion

Fibre Fashion can improve its existing system with less cost expenditure by implementing
it sales and marketing information system on excel only but requires assistance of an
expert. Through this, they can have a good data analysis and trends can be seen which in
turn can help them generate even more revenue.

References
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Appendix A – Scrum Meeting