Enhancing Business Management And Productivity With Technology

You have been asked by the owner of the taxi firm to write a report, to demonstrate the benefits of implementing technology to increase productivity and enhance management.

1. Write a brief introduction outlining the purpose of the report. 

2. Outline the current monthly figures for the drivers using your findings from task 1 and note anything interesting that the figures show. You must place your saved screenshots of your spreadsheet from task 1 to demonstrate that you have completed all required steps. You must  include both data view and formula view screenshots .

3. Explain how Microsoft Office can help to increase productivity for a business .

4. Describe three technological advancements that the business should be aware of to ensure that it does not get left behind. These may be specific to the retail industry, or to business in general. Discuss both the hardware and the software . 

Monthly Sales Trends and Profit Evaluation of X Fashion

The current report aims to assess the advantages of implementing technology for enhancing business management as well as business productivity. There has been revolution in business models and concepts due to the initiation of technology. This is because with the help of technology, it is possible to gain better and new approaches of proceeding ahead with the business activities (Westerman, Bonnet and McAfee 2014). Therefore, the report would evaluate the monthly sales trends of X Fashion and the profit or loss it earned from each month. Moreover, discussion would be made regarding the merits of Microsoft Office to business productivity. Furthermore, it is argued that technologies have made rapid progress in the global business sectors. Hence, three technological advancements would be identified and discussed in this report and the ways through which they could help the business organisations.

The current monthly figures of sales for X Fashion have been demonstrated in tabular as diagrammatic view as follows:

                                                                                       (Source: As created by author)

In accordance with the above figure, it could be stated that Fashion X has been incurring loss in half of the months in the year; however, it has earned profit in the remaining half of the months in the same year. This generally implies that the organisation is in a no profit no loss situation. However, the interesting stuff that could be observed from the profit or loss trend of X Fashion is that the amount of profit earned in each month is way too higher than the loss incurred in each month. In this context, Grant (2016) remarked every business organisation intends to offset the monthly loss incurred by making profits in other months through generation of additional sales volume. Therefore, from the perspective of X Fashion, it could be said that the organisation has generated sufficient amount of profit in the overall year adequate enough to offset the monthly loss.

Microsoft Office is a group of desktop productivity applications, which is developed particularly to be utilised for business or office use. This is a proprietary Microsoft Office product, which was established in 1990. The program is available in 35 various languages and Windows, Linux and Mac variants support the program (Vermaat 2015). Microsoft Office mainly consists of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint and their benefits to office productivity are explained briefly as follows:  

Merits of Microsoft Office to Business Productivity

With the help of Microsoft Word, any business organisation could develop all kinds of financial documents. The template function present in the program could be used for downloading letterhead sample, joining letter, letterhead sample, receipts, joining letter and different kinds of management-related work. It would be possible for the organisation to send e-mails by using the function of mail merge enabling to send a document to numerous people with addresses and names (Vermaat 2015). The utilisation of Microsoft Word in official tasks is extremely east as well as productive in contrast to other word processing software. After the installation and working procedure on Microsoft Word, the organisation does not need to find anything on the search engine. This is because with the help of appropriate knowledge, it becomes possible for the users of the business to search within Microsoft Word when it is linked with the internet and therefore, it helps in enhancing the overall business productivity (Visnjic, Wiengarten and Neely 2016).

Microsoft Excel enables the business organisations in keeping full track of the products sold. With such assistance, it becomes easy for the business owners to formulate sales plans in the market. By maintaining overall product tracking, the business owners could gain an effective insight about their progress made in a particular timeframe and thus, the lower and higher sales trends could be identified effectively (Selene Xia and Gong 2014). Moreover, with the help of Microsoft Excel, it is possible to make accurate return on investment effectively. The return on investment provides the business owners a clear depiction of the capital amount invested in the businesses and the overall profits earned. In addition, the program enables the business organisations to store contact information for their customers. The primary advantage of storing data into Microsoft Excel is that although the sheets are updated or the sheets are added with new fields, it does not influence the content present in other spreadsheet cells (Rubin and Abrams 2015).

The business executives use Microsoft PowerPoint as a strategy for boosting sales revenue (Carpenter and Agrawal 2018). This is because presenting graphics and charts with the help of Microsoft PowerPoint could make it more interactive for the clients. Moreover, in-house presentations are developed with the help of this program, as it is way too cheaper than generating report and chart copies for the business staffs. As a result, time as well as money of the business organisations is saved (Richardson 2015).

3 Technological Advancements Driving the Retail Sector

In the existing global competitive environment, a business process would not be efficient in the absence of current information technology. All kinds of business organisations need to compete with their rivals in order to capture majority of the market as well as for innovation of new products and services (Loebbecke and Picot 2015). Almost all business organisations are depending on computers in order to automate their conventional processes. The computer technologies are used not only in marketing and financial activities; they are used in human resource department, medical sector and system of inventory control management. The three major technological advancements inherent in the retail sector constitute of the following:

Artificial intelligence possesses the capability of converting diverse and big data sets into enriched information, which could enable in enhancing cost, speed and flexibility throughout the value chain. In retail sector, this technology enables the brands and retailers with predictive estimation, merchandising and capacity planning. In the research work of Carayannis, Sindakis and Walter (2015), it has been found that with the help of artificial intelligence, forecasting errors could be minimised by 50%, while there is possibility of inventory minimisation between 20% and 50%. Along with this, artificial intelligence helps in developing effective browsing experience and enhancing customer satisfaction via personalisation. For instance, online retailers such as Amazon, Alibababa and Zealand utilise enhancements of artificial intelligence for generating precise product search outcomes along with displaying virtual storefronts to tailor individual shoppers depending on their unique features and preferences. Thus, it becomes possible for the retailers to leverage data for providing greater effective and seamless experience for the customers in order to increase repeat purchases, conversions and loyalty.

Blockchain is a distributed and decentralised digital record offering immense opportunities to handle authenticity and safety of the products along with ethical standards. One of the uses of this technology in fashion is to check the originality of a garment. The microchips using blockchain could tell the customers with full certainty that whether it was made or stolen and the general history of the product (Cavusgil et al. 2014). Such information could be accumulated with the help of smart phone and thus, there are lower chances of counterfeiting and theft. In addition, the shoppers could accumulate full information of the garment composition, place from where the fabric is obtained and the chemicals used.

WeChat is a mobile messaging service, which helps the automated convenience stores in devoting no manpower on checkouts, cash and salespersons. The QR codes could be scanned by the customers for entering the store and choosing products and then they could use WeChat wallets for making payments. The shelves have sensors for detecting item removal. After the removal of an item, it is associated with the unique ID of a shopper in the smart phone application so that theft could be prevented (Dosi and Nelson 2016).

Conclusion:

From the above discussion, it is evident that X Fashion has made considerable amount of profit in the year 2017, even though it has incurred losses in six months of the year. This is because the amounts of losses incurred are significantly lower in contrast to the amounts of profits earned in the remaining half of the year. Moreover, with the widespread popularity of Microsoft Office, it has become easier for the business organisations to use the program for enhancing business productivity. The three main programs of Microsoft Office used include Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint to carry out the daily business operations. In addition, technology has made considerable progress in the current era, due to which the business organisations are needed to adopt the same for maintaining their sustainability. In relation to the retail industry, the three technological advancements driving the sector include artificial intelligence, blockchain and contactless shopping for maintaining effective relationships with the customers.

Reference List:

Carayannis, E.G., Sindakis, S. and Walter, C., 2015. Business model innovation as lever of organizational sustainability. The Journal of Technology Transfer, 40(1), pp.85-104.

Carpenter, D.A. and Agrawal, V.K., 2018. Infusing information technology into the core Business curriculum: A change management project. The Journal of Business Inquiry, 7(1), pp.3-20.

Cavusgil, S.T., Knight, G., Riesenberger, J.R., Rammal, H.G. and Rose, E.L., 2014. International business. Pearson Australia.

Dosi, G. and Nelson, R.R., 2016. Technological paradigms and technological trajectories. In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management (pp. 1-12). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Grant, R.M., 2016. Contemporary strategy analysis: Text and cases edition. John Wiley & Sons.

Loebbecke, C. and Picot, A., 2015. Reflections on societal and business model transformation arising from digitization and big data analytics: A research agenda. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 24(3), pp.149-157.

Richardson, T., 2015. Microsoft PowerPoint 2013/365: Pocket Primer. Stylus Publishing, LLC.

Rubin, S.J. and Abrams, B., 2015. Teaching fundamental skills in Microsoft Excel to first-year students in quantitative analysis. Journal of Chemical Education, 92(11), pp.1840-1845.

Selene Xia, B. and Gong, P., 2014. Review of business intelligence through data analysis. Benchmarking: An International Journal, 21(2), pp.300-311.

Vermaat, M.E., 2015. Enhanced Microsoft Office 2013: Introductory. Cengage Learning.

Visnjic, I., Wiengarten, F. and Neely, A., 2016. Only the brave: Product innovation, service business model innovation, and their impact on performance. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 33(1), pp.36-52.

Westerman, G., Bonnet, D. and McAfee, A., 2014. Leading digital: Turning technology into business transformation. Harvard Business Press.