Advantages of POS System

The report is based on booming of technology where Point of Sale (POS) system is used into Greenhouse and nursery to track as well as maintain the inventory and determine profits of the products. The POS system is time in addition to place where the transactions are completed and there are no such dues from parties involved into the transactions. The POS system is gained of popularity as it is not away with need for the price tags and there is change into price which is done through the inventory windows. It helps to implement of various profits and loyalty programs which will attract the customers to purchase product along with commodity.

Advantages of POS system are:

1. The new POS system is integrated in inventory control for the business organization. The system will automatically generate of purchase order as well as reorder the items when it starts to run low. The system will reduce amount of work and also expenses which are associated with running the business (Ketelaar et al.2017). It will boost the profits and also profit margins.
2. With new POS system, the managers can run the reports which show how many items are being sold. It is used to spot the seasonal trends into the merchandise sales and also stock the shelves to take benefit of demands.
3. The system is provided with accurate reports and tracks the employee’s performance.

Disadvantages of POS system are:

1. It is required of reliable internet connections as well as ISP for maintenance of POS system which is web based (Willems et al. 2017).
2. The software updates which are common with POS system are exclusive and it is also time consuming. It is needed to pay of new licenses as well as software where there is expansion of the business concerned.
3. There is required to charge of monthly subscription fee with the web based systems that will reduce the return on investments into long run.

POS system helps the business organization to gain of competitive advantage by helping the cashier offers better customer services as well as errors are to be rectified. It will speed up the transactional process and translates higher turnover of goods. It helps to boost up the revenue of the business organization (Hashemian et al. 2017). POS enables stock to scan upon delivery as well as enters into the database system. The stock level is reviewed at real time and proper purchasing decisions are taken about re-stocking made. The POS system consists of customizable reports which are included with vital data like daily takings, providing with an understanding of entire business success. Advanced reporting provides with sales trends into product demand enables the business organization to organize of stock levels and take benefit of market results into more profits (McNeill 2015).  Therefore, POS system helps to gain competitive advantage by increasing of higher revenue and profit for the organization as compared to their competitors. 

Centralized database consists of vast amount of advantages against other databases. The advantages are that both data integrity is increased and data redundancy is reduced, as single storage place of the data which is implied that is provided with set of data only has one initial record. Main advantages of centralized database are as follows:

Improves the data preservation: The centralized database improves over data preservation. When there is fault tolerance into PC, laptop, then centralized database includes of set up for fault tolerance and also redundant storage which can preserve the data, even in event of the catastrophic failure of hardware into the hard drive.

Improves the physical security: The local stored data is represented of physical security risks (Cooke and Zubcsek 2017). The centralized database storage restricts direct physical access to single location and also small team of people.

Disadvantages of POS System

Improves data security: The business is maintaining of large amount of confidential information related to customers, then protection of data is an issue. Offering data security by means of central database storage produces some issues than making sure about data security in various local storage sites (Mei et al. 2017). It implements of encryption of virtual private network, firewalls as well as password protection.

Reduction of cost: Centralized storage system is required the business to invest into server technology but it allows to cut entire cost. Maintenance to the server is less costly as compared to maintenance of computers, when the business is operated into various locations. Therefore, it reduces entire space requirements for purpose of data storage along with processing.

The business is implemented of POS system in efficient in addition to convenient way. POS system can able to track of beneficial information quickly at the point of sale. It is from ordering, and reducing of stock to identify the best sellers. It is done manually but not as efficiently from the standpoint of time management (Ghosh et al. 2017). The questions are answered when the sub per selling items are taken up to much spaces for the hot items. The system is facilitated of decision making as it is used to analyze sales data, figure out the items on the stock and adjust the purchasing levels of the business organization. The sales history are also maintained properly so that buying decisions are taken properly for the purchasing trends. It helps to make improvement over pricing accuracy by bar code scanners as well as credit card authorization capability by means of POS system (Nikolova and Inman 2015). The system helps to gain better control over the information through its reporting features such as sales, profit made, and cost by the inventory items.

Type of network: POS system is supported with WAN (wide area network) as it helps to exchange of information over long distances. It is used to connect of LAN together such that the users and also computers are at one location (Robertson et al. 2016). There is use of PC on one side and POS system on other side and both of them are adjusted in own local LAN. WAN network is used to connect two networks such that communication between them is better over the internet.

Type of media: Wireless technologies are used in POS system. Wireless POS (WPOS) is use of wireless devices for facilitating the payments for the products as well as services. WPOS system is consisted of base station connected to the central network directly and more handheld devices are communicate through wireless. Into the wireless technologies, fiber optic cable is being used. The fiber system is consisted of glass fiber strands over which the optical signals are being sent.

Centralized Database in Small Business

Security: Most common POS problems are that the network is not secured. The hackers can steal of information due to weak set up of the network. The information those are stolen are customer credit card details, account details and others (Lee et al. 2015). Therefore, in order to protect the business from this risk, it is needed to keep password protected network and the passwords should be changed for every 90 days to low chances of infiltration. The software are kept up-to-date with latest anti-virus updated.

Privacy: The privacy risk is also considered as an issue which is occurred into POS system when any unauthorized person can access to the sensitive and confidential information (Phipps et al. 2015). Therefore, the data should be kept password protected so that no other person can able to access to the data without prior permission of the system users.

Confidentiality: The business is loss of sensitive and confidential business documents which would cause at higher impact on the reputation and profitability of the organization (Pantano and Priporas 2016). It is protected by building of better trust on the person those are not able to leak the information to others.

Conclusion and recommendations

It is concluded that POS system is leading products into the market. It allows to provide of detailed overview of the components those are used to run a business organization. The system is also user friendly and easy to access. The system has many advantages as compared to its disadvantages. It is such an effective and efficient system that can store as well as increase the business efficiency. With user of this system, the customers are executed the payments of the goods properly for gaining of more profitability and revenue for the business.

It is recommended to implement of POS system so that the business leaders should set stage towards success. The business organization should at first implement of POS implementation plan so that proper steps are followed to develop the system. Proper authorization processes along with encryption methods should be implemented into the business to prevent the data being stolen and lost.

References

Cooke, A.D. and Zubcsek, P.P., 2017. The connected consumer: Connected devices and the evolution of customer intelligence. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2(2), pp.164-178.

Ghosh, S., Majumder, A., Goswami, J., Kumar, A., Mohanty, S.P. and Bhattacharyya, B.K., 2017. Swing-pay: One card meets all user payment and identity needs: A digital card module using NFC and biometric authentication for peer-to-peer payment. IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine, 6(1), pp.82-93.

Hashemian, B., Massaro, E., Bojic, I., Arias, J.M., Sobolevsky, S. and Ratti, C., 2017. Socioeconomic characterization of regions through the lens of individual financial transactions. PloS one, 12(11), p.e0187031.

Ketelaar, P.E., Bernritter, S.F., van’t Riet, J., Hühn, A.E., van Woudenberg, T.J., Müller, B.C. and Janssen, L., 2017. Disentangling location-based advertising: the effects of location congruency and medium type on consumers’ ad attention and brand choice. International Journal of Advertising, 36(2), pp.356-367.

Lee, J.G., Henriksen, L., Rose, S.W., Moreland-Russell, S. and Ribisl, K.M., 2015. A systematic review of neighborhood disparities in point-of-sale tobacco marketing. American journal of public health, 105(9), pp.e8-e18.

McNeill, D., 2015. Global firms and smart technologies: IBM and the reduction of cities. Transactions of the institute of British geographers, 40(4), pp.562-574.

Mei, J., Li, K., Tong, Z., Li, Q. and Li, K., 2018. Profit Maximization for Cloud Brokers in Cloud Computing. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.

Nikolova, H.D. and Inman, J.J., 2015. Healthy choice: the effect of simplified point-of-sale nutritional information on consumer food choice behavior. Journal of Marketing Research, 52(6), pp.817-835.

Pantano, E. and Priporas, C.V., 2016. The effect of mobile retailing on consumers’ purchasing experiences: A dynamic perspective. Computers in Human Behavior, 61, pp.548-555.

Phipps, E.J., Braitman, L.E., Stites, S.D., Singletary, S.B., Wallace, S.L., Hunt, L., Axelrod, S., Glanz, K. and Uplinger, N., 2015. Impact of a rewards-based incentive program on promoting fruit and vegetable purchases. American journal of public health, 105(1), pp.166-172.

Robertson, L., Cameron, C., McGee, R., Marsh, L. and Hoek, J., 2016. Point-of-sale tobacco promotion and youth smoking: a meta-analysis. Tobacco control, pp.tobaccocontrol-2015.

Willems, K., Smolders, A., Brengman, M., Luyten, K. and Schöning, J., 2017. The path-to-purchase is paved with digital opportunities: An inventory of shopper-oriented retail technologies. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 124, pp.228-242.