E-Business Applications for Woolworths Inc- myassignmenthelp

Question: Discuss about theE-Business Applications for Woolworths Inc. Answer: Introduction The retail organization that I have chosen as part of my individual assignment is Woolworths Inc. Woolworths is a major Australian retail company with large presence and market base throughout Australia and New Zealand. Woolworths is the second largest retail chain in New Zealand and in Australia as well, after the Perth-based firm Wesfarmers. It is also the biggest takeaway retailer of liquor in Australia and the largest hotel and poker gaming machine operator in the country. Retail business in Australia is a huge opportunity and is in an ever-evolving state. Woolworths has evolved ways to anticipate the customer demand, technological changes and market share. The company has developed ways to effectively cater to the customers demand by following the three major strategies of placing the customers at the forefront; listening to customers say; and creating innovative ways to draw them (Woolworths Group, 2017). Woolworths Inc. believes in that commitment to hard work and integrity is indispensable to them. The company also believes in a down-to-earth culture and has a family-friendly approach. The company is open, fair, honest and transparent in all its dealings with the public and investors (Woolworths Group, 2017). Woolworths Inc. has now made adopting the modern IT practices and fixing its technological aspects a priority. This is due to the reason that earlier, Woolworths had failed in its attempt to implement a SAP-based merchandising system. The go-live feature of Woolworths subsidiary platform Big W made the company to lose millions in dropped sales since it was unable to supply orders to local stores. Since then, Woolworths has worked on to regulate the SAP platform and claims that no more reports of outages have occurred (Arli et al. 2013). As part of the up-gradation and development initiative, Woolworths new CEO Brad Banducci has laid out several new plans such as the IT Foundation Program with the aim of overcoming the situation of under-investment in IT. Another major step taken by the company towards IT restructuring was SAPs cloud-based SuccessFactors, a human capital management system that was a mixture of in-house solutions and Excel. This step was highly successful and was considered as the largest payroll implementation program in Australia (Rentz, Thorpe Dabholkar, 1996). Woolworths has considered that new and innovative techniques pertaining to online retailing have to be developed and so launched the Mercury-2 project which aimed to augment the companys network with cutting-edge analytics and greater direct selling capability (Arli et al. 2013). Woolworths has also increased its investment in new supply chain methods considerably to support its rapidly progressing online sales channel that was moving very slowly previously (Tay, 2015). Woolworths has also bought Ezibuy in New Zealand, which was a step towards increasing the online shopping market in the country. The company believes that such a takeover would lead to an increase of 10-20% in online sales and would offer hard competition to local stores and online retailers in the region (Tay, 2015). Conclusion The chosen company in the Australian retail market is Woolworths Inc. which is the second largest retailer in the country. The company has previously been under-investing in internet technologies and since the past few months has launched new strategies to strengthen its position in online retail market. However, Woolworths and other retail organizations in Australia have a lot more to consider and figure out when it comes to effectively implementing IT and other internet technologies in their daily operations. References Arli, V., Dylke, S., Burgress, R., Campus, R. Soldo E. (2013) Woolworths Australia and Walmart US: best practices in supply chain collaborations. Journal of Economics, Business and Accountancy: Ventura. Retrieved from https://journal.perbanas.ac.id/index.php/jebav/article/view/123/90 DOI:10.14414/jebav.v16i1.123 on 14 September 2017. Rentz, J., O., Thorpe, D., I. Dabholkar, D. A. (1996) A measure of service quality for retail stores: Scale development and validation. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. Retrieved from https://download.xuebalib.com/xuebalib.com.20200.pdf on 14 Sep 2017. Tay, L. (2015) Woolworths seeks technology edge after completing $100m Project Galaxy. Financial review. 17th Mar, 2015. Retrieved from https://www.afr.com/technology/woolworths-seeks-technology-edge-after-completing-100m-project-galaxy-20150313-143i2z on 14 September 2017. Woolworths Group. (2017) About Us. Retrieved from https://www.woolworthsgroup.com.au/page/about-us/ on 14 September 2017.