Tesco Analys report

Tesco is a well known international groceries and merchandising retail chain whose main interest has been always to create a loyal relationship with each one of its customers. In order to do it, This Company has established itself as one of the technological, innovating and creative pioneer in this type of business due to the creation of an integrated Enterprise resource planning systems. Although, all of the aspects of the ERP weren’t introduced simultaneously, mainly because they reemerged because of the need for it, they have always found a way to really created added value to every aspects of their business.
A company mainly consist of several departments that needs to be interlinked to each other because their common resources that they shared. One can truly see how this enterprise has created benefits to their customers throughout the development of their informational technological capabilities. These have created a direct impact of the relationship between the business environments agents (customers, suppliers, competitors, distributors, employees, investors) and Tesco. This has resulted in an increase in market share, revenues and cost savings.
The first step was to truly identify and know their customers needs. The creation of the trading stamp was a move toward this direction; In fact, this move made Tesco attract more new customers and take away customers from their competitors. However this strategy was band due to the RPM. Moreover, Tesco conducted a survey that showed that they had been targeting the wrong client profile and that they needed to create a price cutting strategy. As result of this, they computerized the checkout systems and created the club card. The club card gave the customers the possibility to acquire points for a purchase amount and exchange them later when they reach a final amount. In order to implement this card, they’ve made a huge investment on IT capabilities and in a customer’s service call center. Throughout the implementation of this strategy, Tesco got to gather crucial information in order to create more added values to their customers. Due to the awareness of their customer behavior, Tesco came up with new applications such as: associate cards (merger of two cards to collect a specific amount of points for exchange), Points collections on holidays, point collection with Tesco several partners. Also, because the knowledge of each customers profile, they were able to customized solutions to provide their clients with personalized brochures and magazines. Additionally, they want it to expand their customers reach and gain more information through the internet, so they followed up with the net perception program which resulted at the end in the Tesco direct service. This online platform allowed several advantage to their target customers. For instance, they were now able to order from their home, compare prices with other supermarkets and view the entire product portfolio of the company.
The financial department made a huge improvement in the same process. Their increasingly interested in IT, led them to provide the customers and Tesco advantages to manage their transactions. For instances, Tesco took the initiative to provide ATM access in all stores, to permit cash back withdrawals from their debit cards at the POS, 24 hour availability of club card through the ATM, to debit monthly payment with their club card, to trade shares and interact with their club card plus account and to obtain personal finance benefits (saving accounts, motor insurance, life insurance, loans, pays at the till travel, credit card services, and tax free savings and investments). This allowed Tesco to have a much deeper control of the purchasing cycle
The IT advantages wouldn’t be able to be fulfilled if it weren’t for the changes also made in the human resources. After all, the machines are handled by human. Tesco was aware of this important detail and therefore they were able to create the IT platform for the change and break all the opposite barriers. Thus, An IT training session on the checkout system and on the club card were created for the staff and in order to provide their employees incentive to accept this change they provide them with several benefits such as: give as you earn program, new jobs because of community projects and indoor career sites, save as you earn program (200% ROI), salaries, pensions, staff discounts and memberships.
The supply chain management got extremely improved due to the IT changes made by the company. Tesco was able now to fully track their inventory, therefore giving them the option to predict, estimate and create purchasing schedule according to the customer pattern purchasing behavior. Also, the quality control of their products got much better since they were able to recycle the 85% of their products, label all of their products and create a master class program for farmers and growers which led to an increase in efficiency and productivity. In addition to this, Tesco was able to provide a much better shopping experience by reducing the waiting times to the automated process, also provide a baby changing and bottle warming facilities and include a pharmacist into their infrastructure.
As you can see the integration of technology to the business provides several distinctive benefits that led to an increase in revenue, market share and cost savings. This case is a great example of how a company can provide their customers incentive for purchasing in their locations and create added value for the goods or service offered by the use of technology.

Meneame report

Meneame Analysis.

1. What can you learn from Menéame.net user statistics?
2. Against whom is Menéame.net competing? What type of Internet projects or sites could consider themselves threatened by Menéame’s whooping success?
3. Is it feasible to turn Menéame.net into an economically sounding project? Under which assumptions? Imagine that you were to be hired by Menéame.net as Business Development Manager: what type of proposals could they expect from you?
4. The code written by Ricardo Galli for Meneame.net had been open sourced, thus making possible to reuse it for other projects. In fact, some other sites were already doing so (clones), although its level of success was, so far, much lower. Should Menéame.net be concerned about potential competitors?.

Opinion.
First, in order to come up with the correspondent strategy correctly, it is necessary to understand the performance of the webpage through the graphics presented so far. The increasing numbers of page loads tell us that the company is being visited at outstanding and marvelous rate which means that their brand is getting more recognized as we speak. However, once could always assume that this is only aspect that you should be taking into account for a general conclusion but it is not. To emphasize this point, we should take a look at the other 2 aspects presented in the graphs, which are the unique visitors and the returning visitors. This shows up that the increasing slope of total visitors is not proportionate at that of returning visitors. This could be interpreted as a constantly lost of visitors loyalty due to a lack of new added value. This means that every time, there is a new visitor of the webpage; it is becoming less likely that she will be returning to the web page. Hence, the need for a tactic to make an impact by providing an immediate benefit to those new visitors.

It is stated that the main attraction for the user of meaname is their abilities to submit stories they read elsewhere and judge. This mean that the users of this web page is looking for a medium of communication for getting up to date information of the currently world news and see the people opinions and match it with their owns. The term is continuously use in a broader aspect, because it is assure that people choose this service or goods and make a trade off to spend their scare resource of time to satisfy a specific need. Therefore, the need for being informed if the story is true or to be entertained if the story is false replace those other medium that could achieve the same goal. As a result of this, we could definitely say that the main competitors are printed and online books, magazine and newspaper.

As for the business model, Meneame should strongly consider its internet naturally strength, which is their contributors or users that submit stories. The truly relevant that they should do is to establish a mandatory registration in order to track the profile for every single user. This would be an extremely advantage since it will give mename owners the power of building business model through the contributors and the visitors. Given Meneame visits history, I think there is a great opportunity that they could achieve some profits on a periodic and not periodic manner, for instance:
• They can host critics contest since one of their main activities in the websites is the judging of stories. Therefore, the need for other several websites whose model is truly dependent of having a high reputation based on their opinions of events or stories is strongly satisfied with this kind of competition. For instance, web pages like www.IMDB.com, www.Rottentomatoes.com and Gossip magazine will be extremely interested of having a great and objective critic in their payroll. (Not periodic – contributors)

• The mandatory registration will provide them with a huge data base of possible clients for other businesses. This systems when it is used for within the company purposes is known as CRM, but this information shouldn’t be limited to the company benefits but for also other business development. For instance, Wall mart sells information of their sales of products to potential new entrants of the market for business planning and evaluation purposes. (Not periodic – visitors).

• Also they could use a web crawler to scan users’ opinions and post related advertisement on their website through the use banners, layers, false screen, etc.

• Also they could encourage contributors of the web page by paying small portion to promote their opinions on stories and measuring them through ad sense advertisement manages by the owners of Meneame.

Lastly, the fact that this code is open source doesn’t mean that they are not going to make any profits, it just mean that they are going to change their strategy of making them. They are going to rely on things like product support, customer service, and customized use of their web page in order to gain the loyalty of their customers and truly make difference on the market.

Metro Madrid Curios trip I

Many of you know that i come from Dominican Republic, I say this because it actually makes a big influence on the opinion on this next topic. The public transportation of Dominican Republic is ,as many of you know, a total disaster. As proof of this, I'm going to compare several different aspects of this with the one that i"m currently using which is the Madrid transportation system.

1. Availability of different options.

Dominican Republic has 4 main options on transportation: public cars, OMSA ( Bus), Motoconcho (Moto taxis) and finally the new metro that has only one line. however, In Madrid you only have the Metro and the bus. If you compare this two on the basis of number of transportation medium, DR will obviously have an advantage. But you cannot make a correct judgement of this issue by only comparing the number, you need to take account other availability issue. In DR, the public transportation system is often on strike, therefore preventing the people to continue with their work, diligence, education, etc. As in Madrid you might see a line down on the metro, but the metro keeps going and you can change from one line to another. In addition, I was so surprised when i actually saw that the metro in Madrid was going to work on new years eve while in DR they are always trying to get some kind of opportunity not to work.

2. Quality.

Concerning the quality, it is quite obvious who has the advantage. One the one hand you see the deteriorate cars, buses and motoconcho while on the other hand, you see the sophisticated, modern, technological, brand new mediums of transportation in Madrid.

3. Safety

In the last few years, we have clearly see an increase in the rate of crime in DR. There is constantly a feeling of fear of the people using this transportation medium because many of them have been raped, killed , robbed, etc. without the government actually doing anything in order to solve the problem.

4. Price.

When i analyzed the different fees of transportation in DR, it's simple outrageous to see that people actually pay more in DR with less annual income than Spaniards in Madrid. The current fee of the monthly ticket, that allows you to take either the metro or bus, is 46 euros ( 1978 Dominican Pesos) while in DR you could easily pay around 15 DP the trips, and if you estimate the amount for month (4 trips a day x 15 DP x 25 days a month), it will be approximately 1500 DP or 34 euros.

After this analysis, it is clear which system is better (Madrid). Even though, the president of DR is currently making a big effort to improve this by creating a metro, and trying the best to cover his track in the chase of being once again reelected. It will be safe to say that we are still million light years away of having such an organize, safe, quick and cheap transportation system.

Too many user name and passwords?

Hey guys. on this edition of curious abg, we will see a more effective way to manage the different accounts that we have on several web sites.

The main purpose of this blog , as i said before, was to increase my presence on the web. nonetheless, i ve realized that this could provide me with a channel to express my opinion on several diferent topics. As i ve been watching one of the presentation of my informational systems teacher about gaining some presence on the web, i ve suddenly ask myself a question. How is it that he can actually remember all of the user name and passwords?. He always said about putting your information on a cloud as a safe precaution in case something happen to your computer. But either way , i would like to know what kind of applications does my computer have in order to save my presence on the web. In fact, now in order to correctly managed your computer passwords (network, router, accounts, websites,servers, etc) , you have to have a long term memory or do you?.

Keychain is currently defined as a free, open source password management system in order to protect several confidential information such as: Passwords (websites, FTP servers, SSH accounts, Networks shares, wireless networks, groupware application, encrypted disk images, private keys, certificates and more. this particular tool which is a great application for managing your computer comes with leopard operating systems.

Now, you will get the chance to experience how useful this tool is by watching the following videos. the first video will show you a basic introduction of the tool and the second one will give a broader knowledge on how to effectively use it.

1st video:



2nd Video:



Again this video ,as you can see, are provided by lynda.com which you can access and paid for a useful learning experience.

Thanks again..... see you on the next episode.

To be or not to be "pirate"

This would be my first entry in this blog and i wanted to make it a little bit controversial from the start. This Blog is a product of an assigment of my MBA program, nonetheless i feel it will be a great idea of trying to image or create a controversy situation similar what business face in the dynamic enviroment of technology.

piracy as defined in "wikipedia" is robbery committed at sea, or sometimes on shore, without permission from a nation. Althought this is not a perfect match in the business world of entertainement, it has some similar aspects. In our class we have seen the different situation in the business enviroment in which a market make change hands because the use of piracy. One clear example of this event, it's within the range of music players. Not along time ago, aproximately 8 years, we were all use to the idea of purchasing CD and play them on our cd players; Company such as sony,toshiba,samsung, etc. were all making a great deal of profits; also one of the benefits of this new technology of cd players were the artist who sold their cd at a much faster rate. But then came the party pooper, The multimedia piracy, then it came one of the many free developers software that allow each and everyone of us to share music among us, this software were call point to point, since the exchange of information was using this protocol what main characteristics is the connection among two computers over a wide network (WLAN). These newly created software created a total change in the industry. The decreasing sales in cd's caused a controversial and difficult situations for music players providers and artist. As result of this, there was a need for a change of strategy among the different players in the industry, this idea was well absorb by apple with the introduction of the Ipod.

This make me actually want to create a new controversy, since im curios ABG. There is a lot of money being involved by providing online information. One of example to this is Lynda, who main revenue comes from the selling of useful information for individual learning.

This company basic business model is the collection of a register fee for viewing this information. but what will happen if a guy like me, who's main idea is to create a blog starts posting this information without charging anything, for free, for nada,.... Would this change their business model?, is this a crime?. if it so, please tell me, since i"m going to continue this tool to provide useful information for those of us wanting to be better at technology.

If you have any opinion regarding this post, you are more than welcome to post a comment about it.