Information Systems in the Consumer Industry/Conclusion

A case study of reengineering of information systems – industry — A case study of reengineering of information systems – retail — Introduction to methodology — General processes — Industrial processes — Retail processes — Conclusion — Appendix A — Appendix B — Bibliography

The aim of this work is look for a schema in the structure of information processing in a consumer industry. Personally I think we can recognize four types of consumer industry:

Physical goods with industrial origin (apparel, shoes, cars)

Physical goods for personal satisfaction (perfumes)

Services (non material goods) with industrial origin (security)

Services for personal satisfaction (films, bodycare).

Foe each type of industry organizational best practices, KPIs and data collection instruments have been defined but I believe that, up to now, information systems have developed only a local coverage related to immediate needs or to the existence of a single cell information model.

Looking at the whole information context it turns out that quite a few cell have information characteristics (timing, number of data, algorithms) that make a complete formal model unfeasible to exist. It turns out more useful to adopt a simplifying approach and reengineer the process.

Sometimes the general approach is not possible also because it might happen that you are still defining the elementary process. In particular there are many cells not covered by information models and instruments; most of these situation occurs from historical priorities or from lack of technical instruments.

In my opinion we could derive that

		Data collection	Analysis	Satisfaction	Communication
Customer processes
	Product	To be analyzed	To be analyzed	To be analyzed	To be analyzed
	Subjectivity	To be analyzed	To be analyzed	To be analyzed	To be analyzed
	Sociality	To be analyzed	To be analyzed	To be analyzed	To be analyzed
Group processes
	Product	To be analyzed	To be analyzed		To be analyzed
	Subjectivity	To be analyzed	To be analyzed
	Sociality	To be analyzed	To be analyzed
Context processes
	Organizzation
	Fiscal

I think that, actually, the whole part related to customer subjectivity and sociality is left to the retailer experience and intuition. This attitude implies that satisfaction indexes are bound to be very inaccurate and inefficient.

Obviously the relative weight of the various cells is related to the context we are working and, up to now, the “product” cells have been the most important.

In a globalized world were access to product will be eased by technical instruments, other factors will become more and more important so we shall get to analyze them.

We also need to stress that subjectivity and sociality assume a fairly different meaning in the internet world and this aspect is completely unknown at the moment.