Mr Turner Case

The individual store's department managers are currently performing purchasing duties. This means that the suppliers are receiving three (3) orders from the same company for three (3) different locations. The company only purchases goods and services from approved vendors. The company orders are based on "business rules" to control if a purchase order should be submitted. The orders are processed using a purchase order that may be faxed, mailed, or handed off to the supplier salesperson. The lack of a purchasing department servicing all of the locations is an opportunity for improvement. The current way of purchasing is fragmented and is not cost efficient. The reasons to have one purchasing department for all locations is to take advantage of discounted pricing that become available for larger lot size orders. The business should create a marketing department. Included in this department should be marketing, sales, and purchasing. This unified department can be better plan sales campaigns and with better planning the purchasing department would be able to approach their suppliers ahead of time. This time element would be beneficial to the supplier as well. Companies do not want to tie up funds in inventory. This is also true for the suppliers, so if the purchasing department could give their suppliers the future dates of larger than normal orders, or when promotions will be initiated, better prices can be negotiated and hard to find items will have a higher likely-hood of being secured. Suppliers will be able to order with enough time to secure the best price. The supplier will be able to take better advantage of price discounts for lot size discount savings for themselves, which can be to the benefit to Kudlers in the form of lower overall prices. Most venders will concede to discounts for larger orders and as the company grows and demands a larger and larger percentage of the gross sales for our venders, more pressure can be exerted for an even better pricing structure. The purchasing responsibilities are currently being split up between the three locations, which create a redundancy that is not cost effective. To take full advantage of the pricing benefits of larger lot size orders, the venders should be included in the purchasing/marketing network. This would require that all approved venders would become part of our logistics team. This will accomplished by installing Internet linked Computer Terminals to our venders that are also linked to the companies inventory database. When the sale of an item takes place the company instantly realizes the sale and if there is an approval, which may be automated or manually approve the supplier adds this item to the regular daily shipment the next day. When items are sold and recorded at the point of sale, the supplier is immediately aware and replaces the sold merchandise and is sent with the next scheduled shipment.

Accounting data is collected by the point-of-sale terminals (cash registers) that are used in each store at checkout to record all items, quantities, prices, taxes and totals for all daily sales transactions. The information that is gathered from the Point Of Sale cash registers is updated at the end of each cycle. An opportunity presents itself with the updating of the sales information and re-ordering.

The current computer system is linked to the home office via the Internet.

The strengths of the current computer system are that the POS computers for all stores are linked to the accounting system. They are updated at the end of the day, or overnight. The computer system for each location is a Win9x, which is a Windows 95 configuration that uses dial up to access the Internet and connect to the home office. This type of configuration is outdated and slow. There is a stand alone UPS station, a bubble jet printer, and an external