Organizational Structure and Its Importance

Discuss about the Strategic Information System of Lion Beverage Company.

In this paper, it mainly focuses on ‘Lion Beverage Company’ which is one of the leading Food and Beverage Company of Australia as well as of New Zealand. The main purpose of this paper is to illustrate the organizational structure of Lion Beverage Company in terms of analyzing all different operational problems which are mainly related with the organizational structure of a company.

In this particular paper it also illustrates about the most likely acquisition method as ERP which Lion Company have selected. It helps to mitigate all types of challenges which are mainly based on the organizational structure of Lion Company. In addition to this, the proper flow chart of all operations in Lion Company is shown.

Organizational structure is mainly referred as a proper structure that is mainly followed in any organization to maintain a proper hierarchy (Chou et al., 2014). The main purpose of this is to be differentiated the power, responsibilities and roles which are mainly controlled and associated with different management level of organization. The pictorial view of organizational structure of the Lion Company is shown below which is showing the clear view of organizational hierarchy maintained in this particular organization.

The organizational hierarchy of ‘Lion Beverage’ company is mainly considered as an important aspect that helps to manage and simplify the organizational expansion in terms of proper development of the company (Dimitriu and Matei, 2014). However, in relation to this, it presumed that to maintain a better standard of the organization in today’s market the ‘Lion Beverage’ company taken part in different competitive acts of business market which helps to create value for the organization. Any particular organization is consists of various operational departments which is inter-related with each other and becomes essential to manage all departments properly for proper success and the achievement of various functional remuneration to improve the rating of organization in business market share (Dunbar, Laing and Wynder, 2016). All these directly help the Lion Company to attract more shareholders and customers. In addition to these, there are also different types of challenges as well as issues that are faced by ‘Lion Beverage’ company are discussed below:

Improper Strategic Management: The organizational growth of ‘Lion Beverage’ company is mainly based on the proper organizational hierarchy. Apart from that, it is also discussed about different strategic processes and functionalities that help in proper decision making in any type of organization (Fan, Wong and Zhang, 2013). Because of the dearth of suitable strategic management in Lion Beverage, the organization needed to face various challenges and issues that can be resolved with the help of better strategic decision making steps. However, after in depth analysis, it is identified that Lion Beverage is slowly losing their sustainability and customer availability which are becoming the sole most reason for their deviating of target and today’s market space.

Challenges faced by Lion Beverage Company

Improper Communication: It acts as an important operational issue for an organizational development. However, due to lack age of proper communication, the organization needs to face different kind of issues directly related with the management procedure and organizational structure (Hicks, 2014). However, in very first cases, ‘Lion Beverage’ does not pay more attention which rise the conflict level and creates more obstacles to accomplish various functional and non-functional benefits. It leads to the downfall of the ‘Lion Beverage’ in Food and Beverage market of Australia. Apart from that, they are also facing some internal issues like conflicts among employees, dis-satisfaction of staffs and also variability within both high grade and low grade employees. The improper communication between the organizational staffs and customers also leads to low customer satisfaction and ultimate losing of loyal and valuable clients.

Reduced Productivity: Productivity is the major resultant outcome and end product for any type of organization. The more productivity is co-related with the proper organizational hierarchy. Therefore, in this case also the improper organizational hierarchy acts as vital role for the low productivity (Jenkins, 2016). However, with the help of better organizational structure along proper organizational goals and objectives, makes Lion Beverage as a productive and profitable organization. On the other side, it is also discovered that the organization did not follow any considerable approaches and functional aspects of development based on selected supply chain management techniques, proper standard of communication, different suitable actions to gain more productivity and increasing of customer level.

Ineffective Supply Chain Management: Improper supply chain process of the organization is also one of the vital problems which create more downfalls in organizational growth. However, the supply chain management process of any organization is determined with the help of proper organizational structure, so, if the organizational structure is not in good place then the supply chain process will surely be effected (Ma, 2015). Thus, all these irregularities directly cause impact to all associated stakeholders, employees and also create different challenges for the organization to survive in recent day’s competitive market.

Improper Human Resource Management: Due to not having better profit margin, Lion Beverage fails to provide secured and safe job satisfaction to their employees. All previous availed facilities are get inactive and employee’s attrition rate become higher with respect to previous stage of organization (Lin, Zhao and Wei, 2014).

Hence, it is identified that all these functionalities are inter-related with each other therefore, due to one inactive function collapses the whole system.

Solution: ERP Implementation

The most likely acquisition method of Lion Beverage organization is the implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) process. Oram, (2014) discussed that ERP system acts as a vital tool for both the organizational managers and customers which helps to create and show an accurate forecasting of all internal and external processes of the organization. With the help of ERP, it becomes easier to resolve all faced issues which are mainly created due to the improper assessment and evaluation of organizational hierarchy (Ma, 2015). In addition to this, the organizational directors did the implementation of ERP which helps to stable all business related processes and also creates bridge among both organization and customers by improving all their existing modules and doing appropriate collaboration among all business modules of Lion Beverage.

On the other side, it becomes clear that the implementation of ERP system helps to reduce all types of redundancies in the existing system of Lion Beverage. It also makes all processes automated by removing the manual systems. Along with these, ERP system also helps to streamline all processes in effective and easier ways (Subramanian, Venkateswaran and Fu, 2013). Furthermore, it is found that with the help of ERP system it become simpler to provide quality services to customer along with post-delivery supports. Therefore, ‘Lion Beverage’ again started to acquire their previous place for all these facilities to employees and supports to their employees.

In this part, it discuss about the pictorial view of the sales flow chart followed by ‘Lion Beverage’ organization. The flow chart assists to understand their exact problems in a whole process of getting a product from preparation to delivery to customers. Below is the system flow chart of Lion Beverage sales procedure:

Identification of any control problem in the system

The lack age of various inventory items helps to increase different controlling challenges within the implemented system. The faced core problem based on sales process design is the failure of system integration depending on procedures and methods followed in Lion Beverage (van Donselaar and Broekmeulen, 2013). Apart from that, it is acknowledged that because of sales system problems, various items get lost which can raise the inventory problems and the increase of labor cost due to of manual process. Therefore, it becomes important to incorporate all designing solutions to the system which helps to re-check the orders number in effective manner.

In this second part of report it mainly discusses about both the adoption and development process of new accounting software for the organization which acts as a type of application software helps to record and process all types of accounting transactions happens with all associated functional elements like accounts receivable, accounts payable, trial balance as well as general ledger.

Pictorial View of Sales Flow Chart of Lion Beverage Company

In this paper, we have selected Xero as accounting software for doing the proper illustration of the whole process do the proper development and adoption. However, along with this, this paper helps to describe all market leaders, market size of accounting software in Australian market as well as various types of gaps and challenges in relation with the selected accounting software ‘Xero’.

The accounting software packages acts more advantageous for any organization because of the proper deployment of accounting packages it helps to reduce the time consumptions, look after of finances, mitigation of mistakes along with printed improvised machine generated invoices (Viswanathan, 2015). In addition to this, it is also discussed that Xero is one of accounting software, organization that helps to develop better software supports to create various standard and functional  for operating all issues and the development of various types of standard in relation with the accounting department. It is identified that all types of organization like both medium and small types of organization is considered as target market in Australia who mainly supervise all issues faced in accounts department of Lion Beverage.

In addition to this, accounting software is also used for the determination of functionalities and the determination of standards based on organizational hierarchy of Lion Beverage (Zach, Munkvold and Olsen, 2014). However, it also become helpful to determine both the demands as well as needs of any particular organization in effective manner with the help of technical team who mainly involves in the accounting system of Lion Beverage organization. In addition to this, Xero is the considered effective software selected for this organization to access both the processes and  new standards of the organization which also helps to manage all types of accounts details and management information.  

In today’s market of Australia, there are two types of accounting software like MYOB and Xero packages are on leading position. However, it is also identified that for Lion Beverage, Xero is considered one of the suitable accounting packages in Australia that helps in different organizational functional modules (Zhang, Hoque and Isa, 2015). In addition to this, Xero also allows to provide different functionalities as well as operational features required to manage all organizational needs.

It is identified that Xero also provide different automated functionalities to its customers which helps them by reducing all types of challenges they were facing from the manual system. In addition to this, Xero also supports to allow updates all financial data by diminishing data loss, redundancy occurs from the input of large data set that are mainly encountered from the system architecture (Dimitriu and Matei, 2014). Furthermore, there are also numbers of advantages from using of accounting software which generally helps to fulfil the organizational demands. For Lion Beverage, Xero is considered more advantageous for their customers with respect to other market available accounting software packages.

Adoption and Development Process of Accounting Software

From lots of market analysis and investigation on Xero software, it is evaluated that it mainly provides different benefits to their customers. Therefore, some of these benefits allowed from Xero accounting software are listed below:

Cloud based set up: This particular software is mainly based on cloud access in terms of providing valid data and information to all customers and users (Fan, Wong and Zhang, 2013). It is identified that, this could based system acts as more advantageous over other available different software in market based on customer review.

Interface simplicity: This Xero accounting software assists to provide easy and user-friendly interface architecture for all users. However, both functional and non-functional supports of Xero help to the organization to provide all necessary details based on organizational structure. In addition to this, it is also identified that various issues and difficulties are managed in the simpler manner to gain different operational measures (Hingorani, Beasley and Bradford, 2015). It also helps by providing proper availability to both customers and organizational users that helps to attracts them by using their interface design and simplicity.

Fast functional outputs: Xero also helps by providing lots of functional operations to its clients which acts more advantageous for the Lion Beverage.

Customized invoicing: Xero provides the option to create and update the functionality of creating automated professional invoice creation option (Lin, Zhao and Wei, 2014). With the help of online invoicing creation, one user can email their customer link for the live creation of invoice himself. In the invoice, it reflects payment history, payment status, any pending payment and also the whole payment procedure.

Automated backup: By using Xero accounting software, all data are created online back-up on hourly basis so that it can be accessed from anywhere and anytime (Subramanian, Venkateswaran and Fu, 2013). However, it also allow the facility of not getting any data losses due to system crash or infection of viruses, etc as it store all their data on cloud storage.

Some of different challenges and gaps faced from Xero software are listed below:

Complexity: This software is considerably complex from other available software due to its more numbers of options. However, because of complexity, many users are unable to access the software and also face lots of difficulties (Ma, 2015).

Cash flow management: Arranging proper fund for a business is one of the biggest challenges in any types of business start-up. It becomes quite difficult more any entrepreneur to arrange large amount of budget and also to look after on the expenditure.

Time consumption: Xero is time consuming software which consume more time in data fetching and supervising of the database in both small-sized and medium-sized organizations (Viswanathan, 2015).

Security issues: As Xero is online based software solution, it requires proper authentication and validation of data and information to keep the whole database secure.

References

Chou, H.W., Lin, Y.H., Lu, H.S., Chang, H.H. and Chou, S.B., 2014. Knowledge sharing and ERP system usage in post-implementation stage. Computers in Human Behavior, 33, pp.16-22.

Dimitriu, O. and Matei, M., 2014. A New Paradigm for Accounting through Cloud Computing. Procedia Economics and Finance, 15, pp.840-846.

Drury, R.K. and Vickers, M.J., Xero Limited, 2015. Systems and methods of direct account transfer. U.S. Patent Application 14/689,894.

Dunbar, K., Laing, G. and Wynder, M., 2016. A Content Analysis of Accounting Job Advertisements: Skill Requirements for Graduates. The E-Journal of Business Education & Scholarship of Teaching, 10(1), p.58.

Fan, J.P., Wong, T.J. and Zhang, T., 2013. Institutions and organizational structure: The case of state-owned corporate pyramids. Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 29(6), pp.1217-1252.

Hicks, D., 2014. State of the art engagement. Investment Magazine, (107), p.33.

Hingorani, K., Beasley, B. and Bradford, J., 2015. ENHANCING STUDENT LEARNING OF ERP CONFIGURATION THROUGH A QUICKBOOKS TUTORIAL. Issues in Information Systems, 16(1).

Jenkins, J., 2016. Learning Xero. Packt Publishing Ltd.

Lin, R., Zhao, X. and Wei, G., 2014. Models for selecting an ERP system with hesitant fuzzy linguistic information. Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, 26(5), pp.2155-2165.

Lionco.com. (2017). Welcome! | Lion. [online] Available at: https://www.lionco.com/ [Accessed 9 May 2017].

Ma, X., 2015. The adoption of cloud computing for small and medium accounting firms.

Oram, R., 2014. Tectonic Z: Creating a zone of hope. Griffith REVIEW, (43), p.194.

Subramanian, A., Venkateswaran, A. and Fu, R., 2013. Project Characteristics, Organizational Structure, and Managerial Incentives.

van Donselaar, K.H. and Broekmeulen, R.A., 2013. Determination of safety stocks in a lost sales inventory system with periodic review, positive lead-time, lot-sizing and a target fill rate. International Journal of Production Economics, 143(2), pp.440-448.

Viswanathan, S., 2015. Continuous Sampling Plan in Preventing Defects with Risk Evaluation in Production and Sales System. International Journal of Computer Applications, 109(2).

Zach, O., Munkvold, B.E. and Olsen, D.H., 2014. ERP system implementation in SMEs: exploring the influences of the SME context. Enterprise Information Systems, 8(2), pp.309-335.

Zhang, Y.F., Hoque, Z. and Isa, C.R., 2015. The Effects of Organizational Culture and Structure on the Success of Activity-Based Costing Implementation. In Advances in Management Accounting (pp. 229-257). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.