Operations management (see assignment requirements) Essay

Operations management (see assignment requirements) - Essay Example 2. The Range of Technologies in the Modern Retail Industry An efficient supply chain involves better inventory management and reducing the time from the procurement to the final delivery. For these purposes both supply chain strategies and supply chain technologies are integrated into supply chain management to result in an efficient network of logistics. These technologies include transportation, management and communication technologies which work hand in hand to lead to an evolution of the supply chain. Information technology and decision support system are some of the common technologies being used in today's supply chain management. IT is implemented in the supply chain for strategic planning, virtual enterprise and knowledge management. Another reason why IT is frequently used is the E-Commerce factor of businesses these days(Ngai, 2004).These technologies ensure that a sophisticated analysis of the abundant available data is made possible and the results are used to obtain a c ompetitive edge in the market(Simchi-Levi, 2003). Business redesigning and the implementation of technology in business are often considered to be complimentary with each other. Therefore the integration of technology is bound to change the face of retailing operations. IT is a design tool used for knowledge and business management to produce tangible results such as time reduction, cost reduction and an improvement in the output quality. (Michael Lewis, p. 103) These innovations in Information Technology include Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Electronic data Interchange (EDI), Pints of sales (POS) and other Data Mining (DM) technologies. These have radically changed the way retailers do their business and brought about efficiency by reducing labour costs, improving inventory accuracy, reducing lead time and increasing the rate of order fill. Points of sales (POS) POS has been in use since the 1980's and it facilitates the sale of products by entry and access of products in stores. POS allows for automatic and dynamic updates of inventory and sales data when sales occur. Thus this system is frequently used for store transactions, refunds, cash authorizations, exchanging issues and inventory tracking. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) RFID is a generic name for technologies which use radio waves to identify and track objects. It identifies the items by reading a tag and a considerable amount of information is transmitted by just reading of the tag by the reader. This technology can capture product information which can be up to 40 times more than the typical barcode technology. RFID works as an information facilitator which can directly help in developing and aiding decision making in the supply chain. The main features of RFID are real and automatic data capture, enhanced information quality and support for business transactions. Data Mining (DM) Data mining is a process of extracting knowledge from a large database to build predictive models for b usiness decision making. It is used to make strategic and tactical decisions such as sales forecasting, customer acquisition and retention. From the supply chain point of view, they can also be used to make operational decisions like supplier