The Retail Environment and the Supply Chain of Online and Offline Assignment

The Retail Environment and the Supply Chain of Online and Offline Retailing of the Music Industry - Assignment Example It is evidently clear from the discussion that home stereos had initially become popular and truly affordable during the 1980s, which brought about a boom in home entertainment devices. At that period of time, it was unimaginable that in the following two or three decades, record shops would barely exist anymore. However, the shift in buying patterns of the consumers from offline to online retail has led to the stark reality where physical shops have nearly disappeared from the retail panorama. With fewer shops, there is the even lesser number of distributors catering to the offline retail chain. The prices should be compared against that of competitors and price adjustments should be made accordingly. A product tracking interface could be developed in order to track and assert all the titles so that those can be stacked in one place. Comparing products against those of the competitors helps the retailer to gain better knowledge pertaining to product positioning strategies. The produ cts assorted can be further filtered in terms of discount range, price range, publisher, and genre. The retailers can make use of advanced technological developments to analyze the assortments by genre, music company, price range, singers or other dimensions that are deemed fit. The gaps, thus, discovered in the product catalog will help strengthen assortment structure of the retail shop and the weak categories can be developed by benchmarking assortment against that offered by the competitors. Keeping tabs on the competitor’s product strategies is an important part of successful retailing. The music albums that the competitors are featuring as well as the genres wherein heavy discounts are being offered should be researched. Apart from being up-to-date with the competitor knowledge, the retailer must also upgrade his stocks appropriately such that titles and albums promoted by the competitors are available and priced attractively. The retailer should be able to receive alert s on stock outs, price changes, promotions for the key titles and new introductions.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Research Paper

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) - Research Paper Example According to Ray (2011) there are 3 dimensions that significantly control the changes they include: customization, support and consultation. Most of the ERP systems are implemented in stages. For a large company, the project can take approximately 14 months and can require almost 150 consultants. Small companies can take months while implementing ERP while big and multinational companies can take several years. However, the implementation time can be reduced by employing customizations to fasten the process. ERP has the benefit of saving the company’s time and its overall expenses. The organization’s management can formulate decisions more quickly and with minimal errors. Through the realization of fewer errors, the data becomes reliable and clear within the entire organization (Ray, 2011). The system improves the organization’s efficiency and subsequently its outputs quality (Ray, 2011). Through the smooth running of internal processes, improved outputs can be realized for example manufacturing and customer service. It necessitates the flexibility of an organization. The management software can assist the organization to adapt easily to changes due to the presence of less organizational structures that enhances its internal and external components. ERP promotes collaborations between varied business functions. In modern organizations, data can be in the form of emails, audio, video, files which require varied operations (Ray, 2011). ERP necessitates the employees to collaborate more effectively with the content without actually mastering their individual processes. The management software ensures real time achievement of information. ERP promotes a comprehensive view of the company’s status in real time, which the upper level management can utilize in making proper decisions (Ray, 2011). The system ensures effective coding of an