BUS171: Information
Systems and Operations
Team Assignment 4 (TA4):
Disruption Innovation
Dr. Rachel Chung
February 18, 2018
Disruption Innovation Overview:
The business process utilized by Markl Supply Company
to facilitate the flow of inventory from a third-party vendor to a web sale
customer has not experienced significant change within the past decade which
has resulted in a stagnation of their process and room for improvement. Arguably
the most notable innovation to their business process was added five years
previously with the parallel implementation of a retail point of sale software
system called Celerant. This retail software was intended to replace MSC’s
traditional data system of manually entering written or typed data for
purchasing, accounting, and inventory needs. Since the software was
implemented, employees have been making double or triple manual entries for
inventory into Celerant, hard copy filing, and also Excel. After researching
the process for web sales and the data requirements needed to fulfill these
orders, it is my team’s belief that there is room to improve the quality of
this process by increasing its efficiency. According to Kroenke (2014)
“Efficiency is the ratio of benefits to costs” (p. 31). The traditional system
relies on receiving inventory from a third-party vendor before than shipping
items to the end user or web customer. This method allows for quality assurance
and inspection of the items before being received by the web customer. However,
web customers experience long wait times for shipping and MSC incurs higher
costs for receiving, inspecting, storing, and shipping the items. Since MSC is
entered into a working relationship with few select vendors that supply high
quality goods and experience very low instances of defect, the risk of issues
with product satisfaction is low. My team beliefs a viable innovative
disruption to this process would be offering direct shipping or “drop shipping”
from third party vendors straight to web customers. Direct shipping would
significantly reduce business process steps resulting in cost savings for MSC
and benefits for the customer experience. As demonstrated in the Disrupted
Business Process Diagram, activity burden is shifted from MSC’s inventory and operations
to the vender and eliminates the need for double and triple manual data entry
to record received inventory.
Kroenke,
D. M. (2014). MIS Essentials: 4th Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Pearson.
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