Essay: Challenges And Solutions In Envato's Information System Management.

Background on Envato

Question:

Discusss about the Information System Management of Envato.

The following assignment discusses about the information system management and the chosen organization for this assignment is envato. Envato is an austrlaian startup company which designs creative assets for the website designers which include photos, video and 3d models. The company occupies fifth position in the top 25 emerging business in Australia. It has over 250 employees and its CEO is Collis Taaed. The assignment discusses the problems the company facing in the information system. The assignment further discusses about the consequences if the company adopts the e-commerce and m-commerce and finally discusses about the advantages and risks related to the e-commerce.             

An information system can be defined as collecting, storing and organizing the data of the company so that at the time of requirement it can be searches and utilized effectively. Nowadays the companies are storing entire database of their company online instead of offline storage as the result there are huge amount of data is stored online each day and it is crucial to organize these data in such a way so that it can be accessed easily at the time of requirement. This is where information system application is required to simplify their task (Andam, 2014). The chosen company for the assignment is the Envato which is an Australian company, which works in the digital market place which makes products like images, videos, 3D models and photography which is utilized by the web designers for designing the websites. Envato is the startup with few employees so it is possible that they are going to face some issue in connecting to the customers. The main challenge for the company is to adapt to the customer requirement. The company is designing thousands of websites, videos, and images for the clients and it is crucial that they need to store these designs so that if the two clients demands same type of designs they have to design a single project and to deliver to both of them. Without the information system the company will not to be able to find its project thus they have to design again the same product for other client.

The possible solution for the above problem can be the better information system for the organization. A proper data system will help Envato to store the designs in an organized manner with proper description, so that if the client demands for the same project which has been designed by the company earlier, then they just has look into their information system and provide the project without redesigning it second time.

Importance of Information Systems

Every organization dreams to expand their business and to spread worldwide so that everyone in the world should know its name. E-commerce is the best solution that any organization looks up to expand their business. There are various companies like flipkart, amazon, shopclues which are the e-commerce site. E-commerce basically is a platform where the company can buy and sell its product and performs all accounting transaction through the internet. The advantage of the e-commerce website is that the company can performs its business from any part of the world. They don’t have to open stores and show rooms in every city to expand its business they just need a small store to store their product and deliver the products to customer. Moreover the customers can shop anytime and anywhere and can browse variety of the products. The m-commerce is a platform through which the various transactions of the company like accounting and marketing takes place through the Smartphone. Smartphone usage in the year has exceeded over 2.4 billion and is expected to rise over 3 billion in the year 2020 (Tayur, Ganeshan & Magazine, 2012). Thus over half of population will be using the Smartphone in the coming years so it would be a great idea for the company to adopt m-commerce to expand the customer base.

As discussed above the e-commerce and m-commerce will revolutionize the way of doing business. Out of the seven billion people in the year 2016 over 3.5 billion of the population has access to the internet and over 2.5 billion people are using the Smartphone thus carrying out the business on the internet and mobile phones is bound to give them edge over the offline business. Some of the advantages are:

• Firstly the startup and the small companies which do not have enough investment to operate in every country (Peppard & Ward, 2016). Then can use the internet help to expand their business in other countries. They need to have a store where they can store their product and deliver to the customers according to their needs.
• Secondly since all the data is stored in the computer with the help of big data application the e-commerce and m-commerce can help in studying the customer behavior and to adapt according to their needs.
• Thirdly using an e-commerce platform means the business can operate 24* 7 and 365 days. Therefore the customer can browse the product anytime during the day or night according to his convenience
• Fourthly using an ecommerce will cut down various operational costs for the company like opening a store and the tax payment for the particular country and various legal costs. The company has only to maintain its website for the customers.
• Lastly the e-commerce has also has the facility of customer rating and reviewing (Mohapatra, 2013). If a customer gives a good review to the company products then there will be mouth advertisement to other people which can increase the sales of the company.

As discussed there are various reasons why a company should adopt the e-commerce path for its business operation. Therefore to adopt the e-commerce platform the company has to integrate the e-commerce in its organization. To initiate the process of the integration the company has to prepare the customer data, product data and finance database. After the database is created these data is entered into the back end data to operate the website. To manage the data an enterprise resource planning is required (Laudon & Traver, 2013). The enterprise resource planning is business management software which helps an organization to collect, analyze and maintain and interpret the data used during the business activities. The ERP software divide the business operations into inventory management, finance, marketing and customer relationship where a constant exchange of data takes place between these departments which help in efficient operation of the business.

Advantages of E-commerce and M-commerce

Introduction

The supply chain management is basically the management of the network from the product which is dispatched from the inventory to the product which is delivered to the client. The supply chain management includes the manufacturing, assembling, procurement of the products and other logistics work comes under the supply chain management (Laudon, & Laudon, 2016).

The above figure shows the supply chain management of the e-commerce. The steps described are that firstly step of the supply chain management include that the customer books a product on the website. At the second step the product is included in the cart at the third step the customer makes payment for the item (Barnes & Hunt, 2013). After the payment is made the product is transferred from the warehouse to the delivery truck and at the final stage the customer receives the product. Thus this is the whole supply chain management for the product.

Security, risks and threats

Although the e-commerce has revolutionized the way of doing business. There are various risks associated with the e-commerce platform:

• Firstly all the data of the company and the customer are stored in the cloud therefore there is risk of data breach if there is not a proper firewall
• Secondly if the customer gives the bad review about the product intentionally then there will be bad advertising for the product of the company which can hamper its growth.
• Lastly many a times during festival seasons due to huge traffic the website dog the company get crashed thus a better website design is needed for its better function.

Thus for the better function of the e-commerce a strong firewall is required a better ERP software will efficiently manage the operation of the business (Chiu et al. 2014). Lastly the website design should be better so that it cannot get crashed during the huge traffic online system.

Conclusion

From the report it can be conclude that the company centavo can be expand its business if they use the e-commerce system as they deal in the online designs and websites they can sell their designs online in different countries. If the costumer like the design and want to use that design he can buy it online. Thus the companies do not require a store or inventory to store their products but they need to maintain better information system to store their designs so at the time of requirement they can easily find the required design

References

Andam, Z. R. (2014). e-Commerce and e-Business.

Barnes, S., & Hunt, B. (Eds.). (2013). E-commerce and v-business. Routledge.

Chiu, C. M., Wang, E. T., Fang, Y. H., & Huang, H. Y. (2014). Understanding customers' repeat purchase intentions in B2C e?commerce: the roles of utilitarian value, hedonic value and perceived risk. Information Systems Journal, 24(1), 85-114.

Laudon, K. C., & Laudon, J. P. (2016). Management information system. Pearson Education India.

Laudon, K. C., & Traver, C. G. (2013). E-commerce. Pearson.

Mohapatra, S. (2013). E-commerce Strategy. In E-Commerce Strategy (pp. 155-171). Springer US.

Peppard, J., & Ward, J. (2016). The strategic management of information systems: Building a digital strategy. John Wiley & Sons.

Tayur, S., Ganeshan, R., & Magazine, M. (Eds.). (2012). Quantitative models for supply chain management (Vol. 17). Springer Science & Business Media.