Benefits Of Point Of Sale System: A Case Study Analysis

Advantages and Disadvantages of Point of Sale System

Point of sale is a combination of software and hardware that is used for making the business operations work effectively. It takes care of all the transactions that happen in a business. It has replaced the old traditional methods that required lot of human efforts. Point of sale systems are the emerging trend in the marketplace. It has somewhere increased the revenue of the company by improving the way operations are performed. Point of sale system has turned out to be very beneficial for businesss (Fleyder,et. al, 2018). In this report various benefits and drawbacks associated with it has been analysed. The report covers analysis of point of sale system from different aspects. Centralised database has also added flexibility in the business as it has eliminated the issue of updating the data at different locations. Point of sale system offers ease in making better decision regarding the betterment of an organisation. Addition to it the report covers the telecommunication media and type of network that could be used by businesses to communicate between different parties. There are various risk associated with the point of sale system. Thus it is important to protect the system by using various mitigation techniques.

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Point of sale system is a technology that has been widely used among businesses these days. It not only helps in analysing the sale and return policies of products rather than it makes the business automatic by eliminating all the manual efforts.

There are various advantages and disadvantages that businesses face. Some of them are listed below:

Advantage

  • It has transformed the way of working in a business by making it automatic and removing human efforts and chances of flaws.
  • It also removes the problem of data redundancy which in turn enhances the overall efficiency.
  • Point of sale makes deployment of system easy.
  • It makes the working of a business easy by generating the automated report which in turn reduces human efforts.
  • It also helps in monitoring the system regularly so that a proper analysis is figured out about the sale.
  • It build better customer relationship management as it keep tracks of all the all transactions that are proceeded in a business (Wiesmann, et. al, 2010).
  • It provides detailed description of all the transactions thus helps in building trust among customers.
  • It also reduces maintenance and labour cost as all most all the work is done automatically.

Disadvantages

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  • Point of sale has some drawback as the business is completely depended on this, thus it is important to update the system regularly (Saeed, Hasnain and Rao, 2017).
  • If the system is not updated it led to high security issues.
  • The web based point of sale system is dependent on internet connection which makes customers to inflexible if there is not internet connection.
  • It requires an IT expert to resolve the hardware issues (Saeed, Hasnain and Rao, 2017).

POS Gains competitive advantage of point of sale

Point of sale system has number of benefits associated with it helps in increasing the efficiency. These system offer extensive advantages related to utilization of data to make better decisions. This framework is useful as they provide exact information regarding the sales of the firm (Andratschke, et. al, 2016).It also helps in stock management and also helps in controlling money related information which is essential for having higher benefits and henceforth helps the organization in turning into a market pioneer.

Benefits of using centralised database 

There are various advantages gained by users with the utilization of centralised database. This is profoundly helpful for the bigger firms but on the other hand is beneficial for small companies also. Some of the benefits are as follows:

  • High data integration and low data repetition can be guaranteed by keeping information at one place.
  • It offers higher information security as place of attack is one.
  • Easier access to information at times of making decisions as the information can be collected from anywhere in the world. It is made accessible to the end user at the time it is produced (Andratschke, et. al, 2016).
  • Database administration and information transportability becomes flexible.
  • Cost effective because lesser assets will be required for securing information.
  • Updating and rolling out improvements in information is less demanding.

Decision making with help of POS

It is very time consuming process to track the transaction and sale process of a firm manually. Point of sale system keeps track of all the information which in turn increases the efficiency of the business and also helps in making decisions (Lyons, et. al, 2015). The reports are generated are automatic that gives a detail view of all the sale transactions so that best decision could be taken. It also helps the business to work for betterment of business.

Point of sale is a technology that has reduced the paper work which requires lot of effort by making it automatic. This technology has helped in making better customer relations by saving the time and making the work automatic (Cummins and Cummins,2018). Decisions could be made in an efficient way as point of sale system helps in visualizing the business in a presided way. It also helps in providing result that is accurate.

Gaining Competitive Advantage with POS

Telecommunication for point of sale system

The Point of sale system exchanges the information between different parties by using a proper telecommunication media (Huvio, Grönvall and Främling, 2012). To transmit the message or signal a secure link need to be set up. Some of the telecommunication networks that could be adopted for the system are:

  • Local area network- It helps in connected all the devices that are in same area in same organisation. The speed at which data packets are transferred is 10Mbps. It can connect max 1000 users at a time. Local area network are generally managed and controlled by an individual authority (Huvio, Grönvall and Främling, 2012). For point of sale speed it is better to use LAN as it has speed of transmission is fast.
  • Wide Area Network- It is used to connect all the LAN’s over a network. The transferring speed of WAN is directly related to the implementation cost of routers which is dependent on the distance between routers (Katis, et. al, 2017). The wide area network is managed and controlled by a distributed ownership.
  • Metropolitan Area Network- The speed at which MAN works is comparatively very fast and it is used to establish a connection between all the nearby LAN’S. They are generally controlled and managed by government department (Katis, et. al, 2017).

The telecommunication media can be either wired or wireless. By adopting wired technology connection need to be established between devices by using cables and in case of wireless technology they connect to each other by radio waves. The wireless technology offer the benefits of mobility as users can move their system from one place to other which is not possible in case of wired technology (Collard, et. al, 2016). Wireless technology offer challenges to the system in terms of security and speed of data. Apart from that it is difficult to install the wired network and also increases the chances of attacks. The transmission cost of is very high in case of wireless system but they are easy to maintenance and do not require additional cost.

Risk associated with point of sale system is in terms of security, privacy and confidentiality of data. It is necessary to secure the information as it stores all the sensitive information like credit/debit card details as well as personal information. It also runs on every kind of operating system like Windows, Linux as well as UNIX which also increases the chances of errors (Kim, Lim and Oh, 2016).   The network suffers from risk like it provides access to third party user which leads to violation of confidentiality of data packet. It is necessary to allow user to make proper decisions so that no threats hit the system.

Security- the data packet should be kept in such a way that it available to end users anytime by ensuring only authenticated user to access the data (Suresh, 2015).The security of system is violated due to increase in criminal activities.

Privacy- The sensitive data should be made available to only valid users thus proper aces rights should be given regarding who can read, write or modify the data. Privacy is a key factor for a business to build trust among users (Smith and Holmes, 2016).

Confidentiality- Businesses store their sensitive data on the system which should not be lost to maintain the trust among customers (Suresh, 2015). Hackers have found various ways to enter the system and access or modify the data which lead to violation of control.

It can be recommended that to make sure that biasness work efficiently and achieve better growth updated technology should be used. In the world of It technology it is recommended for business to use point of sale system as it helps in analysing their operations in a better way. It gives a complete view regarding what is going in the business. Thus point of sale system makes the business tasks automatic and error free. Thus all the businesses should adopt POS system so that they make better decisions. Apart from that various threats are faced by point of sale system which needs to be resolved. That could be made possible by protecting the information by using encryption techniques so that actual data could not be leaked.

Conclusion

It can be concluded that point of sale system has transferred the way in which businesses work. It has helped the firm to gain better efficiency and also helps in enhancing growth. In this report the advantages and disadvantages of using point of sale system has been discussed. The point of sale system has helped in making better decisions as it analyses all the sales operation of a business in an effective manner. The use of centralized database has been discussed and the reason it is better from distributed database has been listed. POS is mostly used by businesses to make better decision that would turn out to be profitable for the company. In this report various telecommunication network and media that are available has been discussed.

References

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Collard, N., Davidson, C., Beardsall, A., Godley, H., Hulmes, C. and Head, C., Wm Morrison Supermarkets PLC (2016). Point of sale system and method. U.S. Patent Application 14/580,479.

Cummins, M.J. and Cummins, I., Pomo Search Ltd (2018). System and method for point of sale transaction logging. U.S. Patent 9,881,289.

Fleyder, U., Kerner, R., Rabinovich, Z., Salinas, R., Ben-Porat, L. and Frank, D., EMC IP Holding Co LLC (2018). Point of sale system protection against information theft attacks. U.S. Patent 9,912,692.

Huvio, E., Grönvall, J. and Främling, K. (2012). Tracking and tracing parcels using a distributed computing approach. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual conference for Nordic researchers in logistics (NOFOMA’2002), Trondheim, Norway(pp. 29-43).

Katis, T.E., Panttaja, J.J., Panttaja, M.G. and Ranney, M.J., Voxer Ip Llc, (2017). Telecommunication and multimedia management method and apparatus. U.S. Patent 9,621,491.

Kim, J.S., Lim, S.S. and Oh, J.W., Pantech Co Ltd, (2016). Method for displaying transmission status of MMS (multimedia messaging service) message and telecommunication terminal using the method. U.S. Patent 9,357,363.

Lyons, R.A., Lo, S.V., Heaven, M. and Littlepage, B.N (2015). Injury surveillance in children–usefulness of a centralised database of accident and emergency attendances. Injury Prevention, 1(3), pp.173-176.

Saeed, F., Hasnain, Z. and Rao, A., Innowi Inc (2017). Smart Integrated Point of Sale System. U.S. Patent Application 14/850,943.

Smith, M. and Holmes, D. (2016). System and method for point of sale product software enhancement. U.S. Patent Application 14/849,935.

Suresh, V. (2015). Data science with social media to support customer satisfaction in telecommunication industry. Srm management digest, 4(2).

Wiesmann, M., Pedone, F., Schiper, A., Kemme, B. and Alonso, G. (2010). Understanding replication in databases and distributed systems. In Distributed Computing Systems, 2000. Proceedings. 20th International Conference on (pp. 464-474). IEEE.

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