Cost-Benefit Analysis Of Upgrading Office Productivity Software At Healey Ltd.

Healey Ltd is a small management consultancy, The Managing Director is considering purchasing office productivity software for her employees but is unsure of the cost, or the benefits, of such a purchase. 

• Demonstrate the fundamentals of operating a computer to store, retrieve, analyse and present data;
• Describe ways in which information technology can contribute to increased productivity and enhance the quality of management;
• Describe the scope of hardware and software currently in use and the technological advances taking place.

You have been asked by the managing director to prepare a report, with the aim of demonstrating to Healy staff that information technology and technoogyical advances can increase their productivity and enhances the quality of Healy’s management.

1. Write a brief introduction outlining the background and purpose of the report.
2. Explain your findings from You must place your saved screenshots of your spreadsheet to demonstrate that you have completed all points. You MUST place BOTH data view and formula view.
3. Describe how 3 features of office productivity software can contribute to increased productivity and enhance the quality of management for Healey Ltd.
4. Describe three technological advances in terms of software and hardware that could helpe Healy to increase their business productivity.
5. Your conclusion should summarise the main points and encourage your team to value how information technology supports them in their job and how can it be used to increase profits.

Cost of Training

A small management consultancy office named Healey Ltd. Is interested to provide its employees with a better and updated version of the softwares they are using to work for now. There are 25 employees working with the company. The managing director has now decided to provide the employees with office productivity software. She wishes to buy the latest and the updated versions of the software but she is not aware of the cost, which is running in the market at this moment. She is also unaware of the benefits or the disadvantages of the purchases. Thus, she has asked to run a data analysis so that she can make an estimate of the investment she has to make and the benefits that her employees can face after purchasing and installing those softwares into the system.

There are two types of training programs provided by the company Healey Ltd. They are Basic Training, Intermediate training and Advanced training programs.From the analysis conducted in excel, it can be seen that, the per person cost involved in basic training is £30.00, for intermediate training is £40.00 and for advanced training is £50.00. All these costs of training given are exclusive of 17.5% VAT. The staffs undertaking Basic, Intermediate and Advanced training are 10, 25 and 14 respectively. Thus, the total cost of the company for training of staffs are £300.00, £1,000.00 and £700.00 respectively for Basic training, Intermediate training and Advanced training respectively excluding VAT. After inclusion of VAT of 17.5%, the total cost increases to £352.50, £1175.00 and £822.50 respectively. Thus, the company has to invest an amount of £ (352.50 + 1175.00 + 822.50) = £2350.00. Only the training cost of the company inclusive of VAT is a total of £ 2350.00.

The products that the office Healey Ltd. planned to get for the employees are Office 365 and Office 2013. The total cost involved in buying 10 licenses of office 365 is £1,000 and the total cost involved in buying 15 licenses of office 2013 is £2,100. It can be seen that the cost of office 365 is within the budget and the cost of buying office 2013 is over the budget. The total cost involved in buying the licenses of all the versions of office is £ 3,100.

Figure 1: Data View of Training Sheet

Figure 2: Formula View of Training Sheet

Figure 3: Data View of Products Sheet

Cost of Purchasing Software

Figure 4:Formula View of Products Sheet

The most appropriate word processing software feature should be the use of tables. Table can be inserted in Word by selecting on the insert option and selecting the option insert tables. The number of rows and columns necessary to input the data to display can be selected from that option. It is usually a grid of compartments that are arranged in columns and rows. It is extremely useful in presenting a data in the form of a table inside the word Software (Carey et al. 2016). The display of the tables is generally organized and the format is easy to read and understand. The tables can be formatted in various ways. The cells can be merged together as per necessity. The cells can be sorted or aligned (Lambert 2015). There can be shades or colors that can be applied to the tables also. This will make the tables more attractive. The fonts of the texts inputted can be changed too.

The most important feature in making presentations is to make the presentation slides attracting and interesting. To do that, the slides should be kept consistent. One style should be picked for the slides and the style should be kept consistent throughout all the slides in the presentation. The difference in styles in each slide can be strident to the listeners.

There should not be too much texts and information loaded in a slide. There should a mix of texts and images, graphs, charts and tables. There should not be only texts slide after slide. This will make the listeners lose their interest in paying attention towards the slides. A visual break is necessary.

If the slide is used for the purpose of marketing or any other purpose, the title page of the slide should be extremely attractive. This will make the slide different from all other slides. Looking at the title page will grow the interest in the audience to listen to the content of the slides (Williams 2017).

There are a lot of slide layouts present in the office presentation software. The most important slide layout is the title slide. This should be used to make the title page of the presentation. Necessary editing can be done after selecting the layout.

Another layout is the blank layout. In this layout anything can be done, according to the wish of the creator of the slide. The necessary data or texts can be written anywhere, charts, images, tables can be pasted anywhere according to the need and plan of the writer.

Software Features and Recommendations

Spreadsheet software is used especially when it is important to deal with data. Inputting a large data in the excel columns will not help anybody understand what is happening with the data. If the data can be represented graphically, it will be easier for people to understand. There are various types of charts and graphs pre-defined in Excel.

Let a pie chart and a bar chart be considered. A pie chart shows the percentages of occurrence a particular characteristic out of all the characteristics occurred. A bar chart will show the number of times the particular characteristic has occurred (Triola 2013). Thus, these are two charts that will represent the same data in different forms. While doing any data analysis, the form necessary for the analysis is usually considered.

In proper execution of any technology, hardware and software play an important role. Therefore, focus should be given to for advancement of hardware and software.

Use of advanced technology increases productivity of business in most efficient way. Use of advanced software or collaboration Suit is one way to do that. Microsoft team, G suit or Slack are examples of some collaboration Suite. These technologies are developed to allow te4am member in the workplace to prepare working plan, make discussion over the plans and thus help to execute their workflow. These are once in all tools that avail all the facilities to those having proper access (Patterson and Hennessy 2017). These tools contribute to increase in productivity in different ways. It enables employees to communicate over any project without direct connection. There are situations where discussion by speaking with each other cause disturbance. This issue is resolved in terms of offering a chat window. Providing customers satisfactory services should be the priority of any business. For this, employees are well informed about the detail of every customers. Proper software should be used to make this information easily accessible to the employees. One solution to this to connect Customer Relation Management (CRM) sources directly with the specific devices used by the employees (Bharadwaj et al. 2013). Long-term plan for existing band upcoming technologies is the added requirement for achieving a boost in productivity. With passes of time many software become obsolete. Replace these software should’ve with the advanced one. Other than replacing the software, another alternative is make available upgrade of the software already in use at certain intervals.

The software recommendation will not be at all applicable without strong hardware base. The advancement of software should be complemented with advanced hardware. Any business deals with numerous data on a daily basis. These data should be processed before using them. Hence, comes the importance of processing unit. Technological strength lie in the increasing computing power. Speed of the central processing unit should be increased for fact processing of the information. Studies show that in large-scale organizations the processing power of the central unit has been increased by almost 100% in the last ten year (Kapoor and Agarwal 2017). This indicates the importance of using a powerful processing unit, being a main part of the hardware. Another aspect related to processing unit is the Random Access Memory ( RAM). It provides storage to processed work. A power RAM will help to process any task without any lagging. With low capacity RAM the works have been done at a slow pace. Powerful RAM allows for multitasking. Use of Dynamic Random Access Memory is utmost important (Khan and Quadri 2014). IT allows a greater space for the working of processing unit. Therefore, increasing capacity of RAM is important for hardware advancement. Apart from RAM the company should arrange external storage devices for storing enormous data.

Conclusion:

In the present report, a brief cost benefit analysis is made on the decision of the company’s management to install advanced software. The installation of new software undoubtedly increases the productivity of the concerned business. However, apart from installation charges there are additional cost that the company has to bear for properly utilizing the software. The analysis shows the company has to invest a considerable amount for conducting training program. There are three tiers training program including basis, intermediate and advanced level. Total training cost inclusive of VAT stands as £2350.00. The company is deciding over buying of office 365 and office 2013. Between them, office 365 costs within the budget of the company. Office 365 is out of company’s budget. Therefore, it is a logical decision to go with office 365 as after installation company has to conduct training program that are subject to heavy cost.

Some suggestions are given for further improvement in business productivity. These include adaption of some new software as well as upgrading the existing one. Advancement of software needs support of hardware. Right combination of software and hardware enhances productivity of the business and thus increases profitability.

References

Bharadwaj, A., El Sawy, O.A., Pavlou, P.A. and Venkatraman, N.V., 2013. Digital business strategy: toward a next generation of insights.

Carey, P., DesJardins, C., Shaffer, A., Shellman, M. and Vodnik, S., 2016. New Perspectives Microsoft Office 365 & Office 2016: Introductory, Spiral bound Version. Cengage Learning.

Kapoor, R. and Agarwal, S., 2017. Sustaining superior performance in business ecosystems: Evidence from application software developers in the iOS and Android smartphone ecosystems. Organization Science.

Khan, R.A. and Quadri, S.M.K., 2014. Business intelligence: an integrated approach. International Journal of Management and Innovation, 6(2), p.21.

Lambert, J., 2015. Microsoft Word 2016 Step by Step. Microsoft Press.

Patterson, D.A. and Hennessy, J.L., 2017. Computer Organization and Design RISC-V Edition: The Hardware Software Interface. Morgan kaufmann.

Triola, M.F., 2013. Elementary statistics using Excel. Pearson.

Williams, R., 2017. The non-designer's presentation book: Principles for effective presentation design. Peachpit Press.