Advice to Salgado on Upgrading Zara POS System
Zara Case Study
I have an assignment which is below:
In 2003, Zara’s CIO must decide whether to upgrade the retailer’s IT infrastructure and capabilities. At the time of the case, the company relies on an out-of-date operating system for its store terminals and has no full-time network in place across stores. Despite these limitations, however, Zara’s parent company, Inditex, has built an extraordinarily well-performing value chain that is by far the most responsive in the industry. The case describes this value chain, concentrating on its operations and IT infrastructure.
Learning objective:
To show how one company makes brilliant use of multiple information channels: subjective and objective; qualitative and quantitative; and phone, face-to-face, e-mail, and modem. Also, to highlight the inside-out approach to selecting IT. To demonstrate how information and IT support a business model.
The above case study has been added to your Harvard course pack.
Each student will read the above, discuss, and address the following questions. All teams will submit the assignment answers.
I’m responsible for one question which question number 1. ” How would you advise Salgado to proceed on the issue of upgrading Zara’s POS systems?
Should the company upgrade the POS terminals, build in-store networks, give their employees the ability to look up inventory balances for items in their own stores? ”
The case in attachment
Answer Preview
My advice to Salgado is to upgrade both the computer hardware and the Zara’s POS systems to run on a modern operating system platform that is supported by the industry. Since the Disk Operating System (DOS) is no longer supported by Microsoft, should their current system have problems due to operating system failure, it is more likely that they would have a…
(501 Words)