Information Systems and E-commerce School of Computing

Question :

For Tasks 1 and 2 - The deliverable is a written (business style) report for the management of your website client.

Task 3 - The deliverable is a written (business style) report for the director / managerial level of any company / organisation.

Answer :

Task 1

The restaurant owner of Olive Restaurant has shown some interest in the ecommerce field. The restaurant must consider ecommerce option for its business because of several underlying reasons. Time is changing. More and more customers are coming online due to ease of access of technological devices and internet connection (Bilgihan, 2016). Internet brings convenience to the user, and it is known that customers like convenience. With ecommerce, restaurant will be able to cater to its customers without requiring them to physically visit the restaurant all the time. The restaurant can open two facilities through its ecommerce business (Adithya et al, 2017). First is the online reservation of tables, and the second is the online ordering of food items. The second item will require establishment of delivery network through which it can deliver food at the customers’ door steps. At present, there are several examples that show that people prefer food delivery at home as it saves them from variety of hassles as well as additional cost. Moreover, entering into ecommerce will also give competitive edge to the restaurant in the market (Lin et al, 2020). 

The restaurant can initially serve only to local customers because home delivery arrangement require additional cost, and thus treading carefully and expanding the geography slowly will be less risky. Moreover, food is a perishable item. Therefore, it will be difficult to deliver it to longer distances.

As for pricing, the restaurant can charge additional delivery fee from the customers depending on the distance and amount of products ordered. As for instance, if distance is less than 1KM, then delivery can be free on the purchase above £100, or something on this ground. The restaurant can keep two payment options. One will be through website when the customers are placing the order or reserving the table, and another can be through Cash on Delivery when the delivery guy delivers the product. 

The product is extremely perishable and cannot be stocked, thus the customer has to wait till the item is cooked and delivered to them. However, restaurant can stock raw vegetables and other raw materials for cooking depending on the two factors – first is the time period for which particular raw material can be stored, and the second is the existing demand for the product. The best option resolve stocking issue will be to use Just in Time inventory system, which can be cost efficient and can ensure quality timely to the customers as well (Kamalahmadi & Zhou, 2018).

Further, the restaurant will have a delivery management process department that will handle the receipt of new order and delivery of it to the customer. It will be responsible to ensure that the orders are being effectively tracked and monitored online customers are not facing any problem, and hiring and management of delivery boys. However, it will not work in complete isolation. After the order is received, the existing cooking department will be informed, which will ensure that online orders are cooked while fulfilling the demand of on premise customers within the restaurant. The restaurant will use smartphone push notification and SMS facilitate to update the customers about the orders, and internally, CRM system will be used (Law et al, 2018).

Delivery will only be returned if the customer was not available at the said location. In that case, if possible, either the food item will be utilized for on premise customer consumption, or it will be disposed and the cost incurred will be added to the record. Customers will receive invoice once they generate the order, and a receipt will be sent to them after making payment. Both these activities will be done online and delivered via email. 

The restaurant will have dedicated employees who will be solely responsible to listen to the customer complaints and concerns, whether it will be through online chat or through telephonic call. Legitimate complaints will be passed on to the designated officer for resolution in the form of either delivering the food item again or refunds.

The marketing and SEO activity will be done by a Digital Marketing Department headed by a Digital Marketing Manager who will have his own subordinate employees as per need such as SEO or Social Media executives. The digital marketing department will use AARRR Framework (see Appendix 2) to guide its effort for online success. AARRR stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue (Chmielewska, 2018). Through the help of this framework, the company will first focus on increasing the visit of the customers on the website through various channels, which is called acquisition stage. After succeeding at this stage, the next goal will be to ensure that the customers get positive experience at the site, which is called activation. Then the next outcome can be their repeat visits – retention. The next stage is referral where they life product enough to tell others about it. The final stage is revenue where the users’ behaviour generate monetization for the company.

All the bookkeeping activities will be done automatically based on the items sold. In fact, the internal bookkeeping activities will also be converted to online so that both, internal and ecommerce business can be integrated. It will help owner get overall unified picture of this business periodically without manual intervention. Taxation, Vat, and Sales tax will be automatically adjusted by the system during calculating prices. The restaurant owner and other relevant personnel will receive email notifications of all transactions such as daily total sales, refunds, weekly and monthly reports. 

The restaurant will operate in United Kingdom. So it will follow the rules and regulations as per the local government. The restaurant will follow UK GDPR.

The restaurant will have dedicated IT department who will take care of all issues related to website maintenance and keeping it running all the time. It will be ensured that the website never goes down by having appropriate back up options and purchase of service from trust worthy hosting and domain service providers.

Task 2

The restaurant is not entirely moving to ecommerce. It will operate in online as well as offline mode as customers’ preference vary. It is because some customers prefer to eat at the restaurant, while others prefer to order at home. 

Though operating in e-commerce is profitable for the restaurant, and convenient for the customers, but it comes with its own set of risks. It is important that the restaurant understands those risks and arrange resources to mitigate them.

Hacking attempts is the most common risk that the restaurant may face (Sengottuvel et al, 2018). It will be mitigated through the use of reliable and reputed hosting providers, hiring security experts to conduct security audits, and keep complex passwords. Another is financial transaction details theft, which can also be handled by having secure processing such by using SSL, and using trusted payment partners such as PayPal. In order to ensure that the risks are reduced, the company can conduct period internal auditing of e-commerce division using a risk framework (see Appendix 3) (Pathak, 2004). There are five aspects in this risk framework. If the restaurant owner is incapable of using this framework on his own, then he can take hep from external cyber security auditors. The first stage is to identify the risks that are present in the e-commerce. In the next stage, severity and frequency of those risks can be assessed. And then in the third stage, the prioritization can be done and risks will be ranked according to it. In the final stage, the focus will be on the arrangement of resources and building strategies to manage those risks.

Moreover, hosting can be secured by periodic backups, network monitoring for hacking attempts, malware scanning, SSL and Firewall implementation, DDoS attack prevention, access restrictions, and use of Secure Shell (SSH) and SFTP.

Concerns of privacy is another risk, which will be resolved by notifying users about the data that the website collects at all stages of their interaction with the company, and the data collection will be not be done if they opt out (Kumar & Reinartz, 2018). This will be done to comply with UK GDPR. It will be ensured that all legal aspects are followed diligently. This can be ensured by conducting periodic audit through the help of an external auditor who is an expert in this matter.

Payment detail theft is another challenge, which will be handled by not storing customers’ payment data with the restaurant server, but only with payment partner, PayPal. 

Credit Card fraud is another risk that the customers face. The company will ensure that it provides a detailed instruction on its website on how to stay safe from such frauds. The presence of this information may also boost trust among consumers for the website. 

Task 3

3.1 Introduction

In this section, the driving forces and potential resistance or issues regarding new technology or business process uptake has discussed. 

The selected technology is cloud computing service provided by Google cloud platform and the organization selected is Pizza Express. Pizza Express is a group of restaurants that operates more than 400 stores in several countries around the world such as UK, Europe, Indonesia, India, China, Hong Kong, and others. 

3.2 Right time to adoption

It is the right time for the company to adopt this cloud computing technology in its business process as it can significantly help it in improving its service quality. Handling hundreds of remote stores not only require efficient communication but also excellent data management capability. Almost every business is getting data oriented. Today, data has become a new oil. It can be harnessed to define future strategies for the company that will be data driven instead of intuition based. Moreover, the restaurant business has always been a competitive field. Better business decision defines success. However, lack of data can lead to bad decision making (Power & Heavin, 2018). Therefore, it seems that it is the right time for the adoption of cloud computing as it can help resolve this challenge by providing excellent storage capacity that will not be limited by space and will be paid on the basis of usage instead of a one-time fee. This increases flexibility. Thus, the company can have accessibility to the latest technology to handle its data needs, while staying light on the budget. 

3.3. Technology maturity level

The cloud computing technology is quite mature. There are hundreds of companies in various sectors that are successfully depending on this technology to store its data remotely and get access to where needed. If the maturity level of cloud computing of Google is assessed using the Technology Readiness Level (TRLs) method developed by NASA (see Appendix 1) to estimate maturity of technologies, then it can be said that the cloud computing stands at TRL 9 where it is fully qualified for adoption in business processes (“Technology Readiness Level”, 2012). Google has developed its own cloud maturity scale framework (see Appendix 4) that can be used by its customers to effectively implement cloud technology. There are four stages called learn, lead, scale, and secure (Google Cloud, 2020). There are three phases of that have been suggested by Google, they are, tactical, strategic, and transformational. 

3.4 Customer base of technology

There are several companies that are providing cloud computing services and as far as customers are concerned, there are thousands of businesses around the world that are depending on this technology to facilitate their day to day business. For Google cloud computing service, some of its reputed customers are Carrefour, The Home Depot, Gant, Target, Ulta Beauty, Wayfair, Etsy, Woolworths, and others ("Retail | Google Cloud", 2020). 

3.5 Strategic advantages and potential threats

This will ensure that the company successfully tracks and keep records of all its sales and business transaction. It often happens that company generates thousands of data points per month but lose it due to inefficient storage and management. The cloud computing will ensure that the company not only store the data properly at one place, it can access those data form anywhere on the planet. This increases the usability of those data for future of the company. Moreover, cloud computing provides excellent computing capabilities to analyse and understand those data to pave future path for the company. As stated earlier, flexible payment terms is key benefit of cloud computing. It can be scaled to any extent to meet the growing business needs. So company does not have to worry about moving to others when it grows further. It can be easily connected Point of Sale (POS) systems at all 400+ restaurants of the company. Thus, all data can be centrally accessed and reports can be prepared as per requirement without human interventions. Cloud computing significantly increases data security with constant backup and redundancy; remote storage; and safety from physical theft, flood, or fire (Saini, et al, 2019). Moreover, there is no need for a team to manage the system as it is the case with in house server maintenance. Few in house employees can be enough to handle almost everything. 

3.6 Recommendation and conclusion

Overall it can be said that cloud computing is the technology that the company must adopt in order to stay ahead in the competitive environment. It will not only be able to manage all its data needs, it can also use those data to make informed business decisions. Google is a reputed company in the field of cloud computing services. It also has hundreds of reputed international clients. Pizza Express can depend on it to meet its data management needs. 

References

Adithya, R., Singh, A., Pathan, S., & Kanade, V. (2017). Online Food Ordering System. International Journal of Computer Applications, 180(6), 22-24.

Bilgihan, A. (2016). Gen Y customer loyalty in online shopping: An integrated model of trust, user experience and branding. Computers in Human Behavior, 61, 103-113.

Chmielewska, M. (2018). The Beginner's Guide to AARRR Framework — Blog. Retrieved 16 May 2020, from https://partners.livechatinc.com/blog/aarrr-metrics/

Google Cloud. (2020). The Google Cloud Adoption Framework. Retrieved from https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/google_cloud_adoption_framework_whitepaper.pdf

Kamalahmadi, M., Yu, Q., & Zhou, Y. P. (2018). Call to Duty: Just-in-Time Scheduling in a Restaurant Chain. Available at SSRN 3299631.

Kumar, V., & Reinartz, W. (2018). Customer privacy concerns and privacy protective responses. In Customer Relationship Management (pp. 285-309). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Law, R., Fong, D. K. C., Chan, I. C. C., & Fong, L. H. N. (2018). Systematic review of hospitality CRM research. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.

Lin, X., Zhou, Y. W., Xie, W., Zhong, Y., & Cao, B. (2020). Pricing and Product-bundling Strategies for E-commerce Platforms with Competition. European Journal of Operational Research, 283(3), 1026-1039.

Pathak, J. (2004). A conceptual risk framework for internal auditing in e‐commerce. Managerial Auditing Journal.

Power, D. J., & Heavin, C. (2018). Data-based Decision Making and Digital Transformation. Business Expert Press.

Retail | Google Cloud. (2020). Retrieved 14 May 2020, from https://cloud.google.com/solutions/retail

Saini, H., Upadhyaya, A., & Khandelwal, M. K. (2019). Benefits of Cloud Computing for Business Enterprises: A Review. Available at SSRN 3463631.

Sengottuvel, P., Hussain, J. H., & BIST, B. (2018). Ethical Hacking. International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics, 118(18), 725-731.