Portfolio Analysis and Future Investment assessment

SSL is a 30 year old security services provider from the UK which is headquartered in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire and had £98.4 million of turnover in 1997 and profitability growth of 9.2% The company provides a range of service that include armoured transport, business security, and domestic security. The company has four major divisions that include Private Transport Division (PTD),  Business Security Division (BSD), Domestic Security Division (DSD), and Home Office Services Division (HOSD). This report goes deep into studying the operations of the company to understand the IS strategy of the company and explores its potential for future growth by selection of appropriate strategies.

The company provides some key security services that include armoured transport, business security, and domestic security. Armoured transport takes care of transfer of cash, cheques and high value items between banks and businesses. In business security services, the company provided guards to companies, analyses their security system and provides security devices. Domestic security services includes domestic security analysis and security devices provision. Within this service, the company has also started helping courts and police authorities with transfer of prisoners on contract basis.

The company has expanded itself over the years through acquisitions and has shaped itself into an entity with four major divisions including Private Transport Division (PTD) in Bedford,  Business Security Division (BSD) in Liecester, Domestic Security Division (DSD) in Newscastle, and Home Office Services Division (HOSD) in Central London providing services all over England and Wales. Each division is autonomous and carries out its operations exclusively.

The company has four major divisions each operating autonomously and have their own systems in place. These include:

PTD: This division of the company has four key sections operating and these include –

• Sales- PTD has a sales section that has contract sales for transportation of regular items handled over a specific time period and one-off sales for single transportation task. The division has a senior sales manager heading the sales department which is also managed by sales coordinator and sales executives.
• Marketing- It runs a marketing department with two people employed which takes care of core business operations of SSL (Galliers & Leidner, 2003).
• Transport- Transport section of PTD takes care of transportation operations, scheduling, route determination, security team selection, vehicle maintenance, and staff duty rostering.
• IS Section- An information systems section is a sub-section in transport section and operates with 3 personal computers running Financial ledgers (Sage Sovereign), Route planning (Autoroute), and Duty rostering (end-user developed spreadsheet). Midwest Bank Business Services is an external agency that takes care of Payroll processing for the company. Job costing is managed manually for one-off business orders and lacks an information system. The current IS function in the division is managed by an Ex-police officer who is not an IT expert but has some experience with IT (Altameem, et al., 2014).

BSD: BSD targets hi-tech marketplaces and helps companies facing computer theft in managing their physical security. This division of the company has three key sections operating and these include –

• Sales– The section is headed by Sales Director who has a  senior sales consultant reporting to him and managing a team of sales consultants in Leicester. The division has a personal computer with sales ledger to record sales figures and the monthly report of progress is sent to Milton Keynes using a floppy disk. Another PC has a sales tracking and marketing system running on it. Sales section of the division has a sub-section that takes care of installation of security equipment’s in customer locations. The sales team also takes care of marketing function through local advertising (Egwakhe, 2011).
• Finance – The company has PC-based financial ledgers that are used to produce Purchase and General Ledger information but the reporting of the same is done manually using hard copy to head office because of incompatibility of ledges with head office systems. Another PC has a Pegasus payroll package that takes care of payroll processing.
• Purchase– It is a sub-section under finance which takes care of procurement of security equipment’s for installation. The purchase data is manually passed to the finance department for processing.
• For managing the information  system,  a fresh graduate from business computing has been hired replacing a senior accountant who handled the work before(Arvidsson, et al., 2007).

DSD: It is the most recent division of SSL that has domestic security specialist working for them through an acquired organization. The division has a sound infrastructure, reasonable customer base, and has been focused on financial growth through business expansion. The strategies that division would be adopting for this include increasing customer base, launching new services such as audits, and providing maintenance to existing systems. The division has offices at area levels with each locally managing sales, procurement, and installation of security equipment’s. Cost and revenues are also managed locally with little intervention from the division head office which only collects financial data from different offices and passes the same to the headquarter of SSL on paper. This division has no IS section or staff working for it (Toma, et al., 2012).

Information System Strategy

HOSD: This division was set 3 years back with an order received for prisoner transfers between court and police cells. The division office is in Central London which is supported by 6 other offices at regional level located in regions of England and Wales. These offices carry out transportation of prisoners and coordinates staff for transportation and police station services. The primary responsibilities of the headquarter are coordinating with regional offices, ensuring contractual arrangements are legally followed, managing costing of services, and processing accounts. The division has an IBM AS/400 minicomputer used for financial ledgers, budgeting and costing purchased from KCB Ltd in the headquarter and each regional office has a routing and rostering software running on regional AS/400 PC. Divisional head office also has a few PCs running spreadsheets and other business management packages. A hybrid manager with both IT and financial skills manages the computing at head office and is helped by one analyst and one operator (Karim, 2011).

IS at head office only consists of the manual reports that are received from divisions that are keyed manually in mainframe systems for financial management. The IT systems are outdated and mostly manual. The headquarter has a DP manager and six data entry clerks, three programmers, a systems analyst and two computer operators.

The company has a very limited uses of IS systems with a few computers as running separate software such that the reports coming out from them are manually sent to the headquarters where they are collated. The company does not have any IS strategy currently and it needs to be formulated.

An information system strategy describes how hardware, software, networking and data systems would be managed including what to be done, who would be made responsible and where would be the storage facility (Kornkaew, 2012).

In order to use the IS strategy and put the systems in place, the company would need to establish IT systems. As the current system is mostly manual, the company would need a reengineering to be able to do that. The IS strategy can be defined for the company as follows:

Hardware: The company can upgrade the existing computers to latest configuration so that higher data requirements and advanced management applications can be run on them. In each department, a PC may be provided to every employee working in the organization. The hardware would also include servers for application and database. Each of the office would need a personal computer with each divisional office needing an additional application server and the headquarter needing a database server with application servers to manage centralized data systems (Alshubaily & Altameem, 2017).

Strategic Potential

Software: Instead of running multiple legacy software in multiple divisions, the company can deploy one single MIS solution that would be able to handle operations across the organization and can be accessed through multiple user provisions in each regional office and divisional offices. This would require a complete reengineering of operations and the staff would be required to be trained on using systems instead of manual processes for managing data (Pearlson & Saunders, 2006).

Networking: Latest networking equipment’s like routers and cables can be deployed based on the new infrastructure that would need a real time integration between different systems deployed in different offices of the company. Communication facilities scan be used for bringing coordination between different teams working across the organisation. For appropriate communication facilities, appropriate communication components would have to be installed at the health quarter as well as individual offices allowing internet connectivity for building coordination between different teams (Chen & Teubner, 2010).

Data: The data generated from each divisional and regional office can be directly entered into a centralized system that stores all the data in the centralized database that is accessible to all office personnel with rights given for access based on their division and work responsibilities. Instead of manual reporting, the centralized database would allow managers to cull out reports themselves based on what and when they would need. Reporting templates can be set in the systems for data reporting such that reporting also becomes automatic and needs least intervention from the people (Merali, et al., 2012).

A number of strategic benefits can be achieved with the deployment of this strategy for managing information systems in the company such as:

• The MIS system would allow the individual managers and operators to enter data directly into the system which would get stored in the back end database such that reporting would not require rekeying of data at the headquarter which would save the time and administrative costs of the company(Babaei & Beikzad, 2013)
• With the use of a centralized system, a real time visibility would be achieved by managers who can gain access to any data from any place across the organization
• With enhanced data availability, the reporting would be fast and thus, the people working on the organization would be able to focus on more important functions(Kuppili & Aryasri, 2012)
• With the use of new information systems, the company would be able to respond fasts to inquiries and manage services better which would enhance their productivity in people
• With the use of centralized database, the company would be able to use innovation and build new services which would help in expanding portfolio and gaining revenues(Intel, 2014)

SSL has divisional offices that have their exclusive IS infrastructure and sub-offices with their own systems including computers with applications and those taking manual data entries. The reporting of data is done manually through papers that are printed in individual offices and then sent to the head office where the data is keyed to a central information system. The company wide information system can thus be said to be location only in the headquarter while other offices only support with information  manually. The company has options to locate there IS in divisional offices as well as the head office or continue expanding from the head office upgrade. Installation of IS systems in individual divisional offices can provided out to be costly and thus, it is recommended that all the IS systems including database server and application server are located in the headquarter while other offices are provided with software modules in their personal computers to take care of end point data collection allowing them to store the data directly into the server located at the headquarter (Kaplan & Norton, 2005).

Conclusions

This report explored the case of a 30 year old security organization that provided armoured transport, business security, and domestic security to companies and people in England and Wales. It was found that the company did not have any organized IS system and all its divisions operated individually taking care of various operations individually. A need was realized to create a centralized IS infrastructure at the head office and install MIS system modules in each offices of the company to manage data entry and make the data available in the real time across the organization. This would a variety of benefits to the company such as reduction in administrative costs, improvement in productivity, enhanced customer service, and real time visibility of the system. 

References

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