Kudler Fine Foods Case Study

Located in the metropolitan area of San Diego, California, is a very classy specialty food store called Kudler Fine Foods. This store currently has three locations with average of 8,000 square feet per store. It specialize in many different areas like fresh produce, cheese along with other specialty products, condiments along other packaged foods, bakery including pastry products and fresh meat including seafood. What make Kudler Fine Foods so special are the wide selections of imported and domestic foods and wines.

Kudler Fine Foods has recognized the need to integrate a frequent shopper program to increase loyalty. With returning customers, Kudler will be able to develop long-term relationships that will both benefit the company and the customers who will receive perks and pricing advantages. The organization is also read to take on the task of designing and developing the system, the project team has completed the initial task of determining the requirements and feasibility, and will begin to come together to move the project forward. With a little bit of careful planning and a good management team, the new frequent shopper program will be a great success.

Statement of Scope and Goals

Currently, Kudler Fine Foods has an antiquated system to track information. The company tracks profit levels and dollar values by each day, tracks profit margins and dollar sales by item, and track profit margin and dollar value by each transaction. However, it is this company's goal to integrate a new system to monitor or track its customers purchasing behaviors. In addition, each location has its own way of merchandise quality, deliver, and pricing. It is to the benefit of all locations to combine these actions or orders to be knowledgeable; which prevent excessive or unnecessary ordering of items that improves cost savings. Therefore by integrating a new system to modify and increase the assistant of the currently advertising, accounting, inventory managing forecasting, merchandise and pricing sections along with appreciating the loyal customer; would definitely increase profits.

Supporting Measures for Success

When companies introduce a frequent shopper program into their business, they are looking at it from several different positions. Taking this into consideration as merely a business decision is a wise idea. Business decisions are often overlooked and that can create static within a company. Covering every possible business aspect can deliver you successful results when creating this type of program. A frequent shopper program revolves around one thing, "the customer."

Customers often shop at their favorite grocery store for several reasons. Convenience of location, they like the selection of goods, the prices, or the great service they offer. Introducing a frequent shopper program would be another great reason to shop at that grocery store. Giving back to a customer is a very important business decision none the less; it requires the knowledge of the tangible ramifications of the introduction to that program.

The success of this program will offer a lot in return to this company. Customers who have shopped at Kudler foods for a few years will have another reason to make it the one stop shop for all of their fine foods. You will be helping them in the best way possible, saving at the register. The success will not stop there. This program will have the ability to reach out to new customers. Offering something to new customers will attract new attention to your business and eventually gain business.

Our goal introducing this program is to advance your current business while providing an exceptional service that will keep customers coming back to Kudler. Having a frequent shopper program is like having a shopper's insurance policy. The more a customer purchases a product the more they will receive in return.

Project Feasibility

The Kudler Fine Foods store is requesting help with a development system to track their customer's purchases on the Frequent Shopper Program. This will in turn allow the company to increase their revenue along with allowing them to give out customer rewards to their loyal customers. The object is more or less to track the information of their buyers to allow better services to them and to also grant their more loyal customers with added services and bonuses. This Frequent Shopper program will allow Kudler Fine Foods to change prices and other feature to better suit their customers' needs more closely. This works by allowing customers that shop with them more often to be awarded more for spending more, these benefits are usually discounts on other items they sell or threw partnership with another company. This allows several companies to group up and give discounts to people that shop with them a lot to their group of store. So people buy stuff they may buy every day to get points towards other things they want or need or maybe just save money on stuff they buy every day. Biggest issues I could see with a system like this is if the computers glitch and don't award points to customers, this can be resolved with confirmed purchase and point list of date points were received.

Technical Analysis

For a project like this to work smoothly the current system will most likely not be able to support all the new software and programming. The IT department at Kudler Fine Foods will have to get a list of new equipment and software needed to transition over smoothly. The old system will have to be setup and ready for this by having the IT department prep ahead of time. The issues that would arise here would mostly be issue that pertains to the switch over and customer's points not being added correctly or issues with the upgrade which could include anything from not getting the correct software and hardware to human error on time estimates of switch over. My best opinion would be to have Kudler Fine Foods notify their customers of the upgrade and to keep their receipt in case of any incorrect balance on their point system.

Economic Analysis

More or less the cost of the system will be high for sure so to offset the high cost and not suffer a huge drain in resources and money the company will have to find ways of making that money back. On the one side we have money going out for new hardware and software along with money for training for employees on the new equipment. The other side money coming in by means of something like a refer to a friend type program that would allow Kudler Fine Foods to expand its influence to new members and bring in a nice chunk of cash to offset the money going out.

Current Business Process