Zara

I am going to keep this one nice and short.

Zara is a clothing company that coins itself on having the freshest, newest, and most stylish inventory of any other clothing line.  It seems that this is their sustainable advantage because their stores are predominantly located on the most popular streets in the most popular cities, bringing in the trendiest crowds.

Being that fresh inventory is seemingly the staple of Zara's business model, having their IT solutions provided by a system that runs off of DOS could prove to become a core rigidity.  The simplicity of the system has worked up to this point, but with the treat of losing hardware support and Microsoft not deciding to support DOS anymore could prove to have more risk than reward.

Just imagine if Zara lost all hardware support and the potential lost sales in the time it would take to recover.  I really do not see the solution to this case as a "do nothing" solution because the losses incurred in the worst-case-scenario can be detrimental to the company's future. 

Two main issues with the current system under DOS:

1.) The PDA's and the POS do not share information.

2.) Inventory Balnces can not be looked up.

I have not heard of anyone using floppy disks since I was in elementary school and this case is not that old.  With unlimited storage space available through the Internet, there is no reason a business should not be using this avenue to manage their data.  There won't be any lost floppys anymore, the time to upload the information would be cut drastically, and the Zara central offices would be informed about inventory on cue.  In other words, the room for error is reduced significantly by updating their POS system to something other than DOS.  Plus, looking at Zara's financial performance, it does not look like they are losing any momentum with years of consecutive growth.

With such growth, the risk of continually operating on a DOS system becomes multiplied exponentially.  Plus, the other issue of not being able to look up inventory balances becomes a more significant issue beign that Zara likes to have the freshest inventory in their stores.  Just imagine all of the stores are linked to a central inventory system that can be viewed by decision makers and all the apporpriate apparel can be stocked more appropriately in the most appropriate stores in a manner that does not include going through the store and manually counting what is still on the racks.

I have a little experience with managing POS systems.  I worked in Colorado trying to convert a system that was designed for the medical dispensaries to become functional for any small businesses.  The aspect that I had most experience in was trying to get this POS system into liquor stores.  This system offered everything from payroll, inventory, and all other aspects included in running a small business while it also funneled the information into financial reports.  This was all done in a live manner where managers could access the business' database and view the progress remotely.  Sounds like something like this could be used for Zara.  Since I know that one liquor store on this system costs a nominal monthly fee of $109, I don't see why one Zara store could be operated costing the same. 

If you want to check out the company I worked for, it is <adilas.biz>.  It's based out of Salida, CO and it stands for "all data is live and searchable" or just Salida backwards.

Zara need to change!