Executive Summary:
My decision is to assess the benefit of upgrading Zara’s existing IT infrastructure in order to enhance scalability of their IT infrastructure. An analysis will be conducted where Zara’s business model will be discuss in details including their operational capabilities; competitive advantage will be identified; requirement of upgrades will clarified and cost & benefit of upgrading existing stable IT system will be analyzed at the end. An action plan will follow after analyzing which will include steps to be taken in order to upgrade the system that aligned with Zara’s corporate goal. This report will support us in favor of upgrading Zara’s IT system to streamline their supply chain.
Key Assumption:
• It has been anticipated that store managers are in favor of upgrading POS terminals. Upgrading POS terminals and application will help manager to executive transaction using larger screen and with better functionality.
• Purchasing PDA device is redundancy cost for Zara. It constantly upgrade store PDA’s as they become discontinued or technologically becomes backward. Upgrading POS terminals with new operating system would minimize this problem.
Issues:
One of the main issues is to decide whether this is the right time to make upgrades. Because, existing system has been working well so long and not much effort has to be put on in order to maintain. Moreover, sales get recorded in stores around the world with no problem. It is also questionable whether Zara need any additional functionality at the moment in addition to what are available. Another issue is that Zara has made major capital investment in production and distribution facilities. However, they never formally discussed about investing to upgrade their IT infrastructure. Even Sanchez never thought of upgrading them as terminal vendor assured him that they are not making any drastic change. Here, terminal might want to continue the contract by showing the value of no...