Club_It_Part_1

Club IT - Part 1 BIS-219 Club IT - Part 1 Club IT is a nightclub that offers different genres of music and a trendy hot spot for people who love to have a great evening out. The owners, Lisa and Ruben, had a vision when they decided to open the club. That vision was to ensure that patrons had a fun place to come to and kick back with a night full of ambience and creativity. The mission for Club IT is to offer live music, DJ’s, dance space and refreshments to suit the lifestyles of the members of the community, and to become a hot spot meeting place where people gather on a regular basis developing new friendships for years to come. (Rainer, Turban: About Club IT) As an intern at Club IT, it is my duty to ensure that Club IT has an information system that is effective and efficient to suit the needs of the owners and employees as well as being user friendly. The first thing we need to do is establish what type of information system will benefit Club IT. A computer-based information system will definitely be needed so that all activity can be easily tracked and researched. Considering that Club IT is a patron type business, we will need a transaction processing system which will allow us to record sales as they occur. The cash register and credit card machines will be linked to our operating system so that all sales and other business related entries are kept together for accuracy and will coincide with each other for reporting and tracking purposes. In addition to the transaction processing system, we will need a functional area IS, an office automation IS and a management IS. These systems need to all be linked together so that we can keep track such things as payroll, financial reporting and sales. We also need the capability to produce documents/memos, spreadsheets and create databases. The information system that links all of these factors together needs to be user friendly and kept protected. Each employee should have his own login and password; currently, everyone logs in with the same login, which is not recommended. Considering that each individual employee’s information is private, we need to make creating logins a priority. The nightclub has just been remodeled and the ambience is that of high energy and a fun atmosphere. Lisa and Ruben have assured me that they wish for Club IT to be competitive and innovative so that they can continue to grow and of course be profitable. One way for them to achieve these goals is to have an information system built to support their immediate needs. Since Club IT has a client base, whose intentions are to drink, snack and dance, it would be wise to make sure that the website supports the club’s mission. The site inform the patrons of pricing, menus, music, merchandise for sale, pictures of the club on one of its busiest nights to show potential patrons what they should expect when they visit. I believe that we should also include some short bios about the owners and staff at Club IT since we intend to build long lasting relationships with our patrons. A well organized website is key in starting any business because it allows you to reach a broader range of clientele. In order to have competitive advantage, Club IT needs to consider the following strategies: Cost leadership strategy, differentiation strategy, innovation strategy, operational effectiveness strategy and customer-orientation strategy. The club will definitely be able to fulfill its customer-orientation strategies because that is Club IT’s #1 goal: to make the customers happy! By implementing a good IS, we will be able to ensure a strategy for operational effectiveness. We will do some research on other local clubs to see what types of strategies they utilize to make their operations run smoothly in this industry and make it our goal to improve our own methods so that we can remain competitive. We want to be innovative so, we will take a trip to visit some of the local hot spots and see what we can do with our club to make it stand out from the rest. Maybe put in some type of exotic lighting and change the colors to match the mood of the music on certain nights. I believe that we should have a membership link on the website so that frequent patrons can get updates on any changes in the menus or music, or we can make a wish list link available so that the patrons can request certain items for private events. More than anything, we want to ensure that our costs don’t outweigh our efforts for remaining competitive in this business. From the looks of things, our costs are only about 1/3 of our sales, so that’s not bad at all. Lisa and Ruben, I believe that Club IT has an advantage over the competition so far, but to remain competitive, we need an IS that will handle operations, marketing & sales, office management (i.e. payroll, back office duties), and a website that offers creativity and options for the patrons. I will continue to perform research to find out what types of applications are available to suit our needs, but I am thinking that using Windows as our operating system will give us several options as to what applications we can use. For the financial needs of the club, I think that using Peachtree or Quickbooks is the way to go. We are a small business and both of those applications handle the accounting needs of small businesses. Once the business grows over time, we can always upgrade to a larger version of one of these software or consider a different application entirely, based on our needs at that time. Since most applications work well with Windows, especially for our needs, I think that this is an excellent choice because it will be sufficient for our current objectives. We can keep track of inventory and sales through Peachtree or Quickbooks (which are both great choices with the many options you can add to the application to suit your needs). The staff should be trained on how to utilize the application so that everyone knows how to use it in case someone is not at work on a particular day and inventory needs to be ordered and/or counted. I believe that this is the start of something big and it will only get bigger with time and dedication. We will make the mission of Club IT a never ending goal that we will always reach beyond the boundaries to achieve. References Introduction to Information Systems, Second Edition; Rainer & Turbin; Chapter 2 Rainer, Turban - Introduction to Information Systems: Supporting and Transforming Business, 2nd Edition; www.bcs.wiley.com; Student Companion Site – Club IT