Management Information System For The Cosmetic Business - Samples

Question: Discuss about the Management Information System For The Cosmetic Business. Answer: Introduction This report presents an idea for starting a cosmetic business in the market for commercial purpose. It also gives the organizational structure that the business would have along with the list of the departments. This report proposes a management information system for the business. It gives an overview about the information system requirement for the organization. Products: Cosmetic Products The products that the new cosmetic business will manufacture and sell are: Eye makeup: This cosmetic company will sell several products under this category of eye makeup like eye shadow, eye liner and eye mascara. Face makeup: Face blush, face compact, foundation and face mousse are the cosmetic products that the company will manufacture and sell. Lip makeup: Different categories of lip makeup like lipsticks, lip gloss and lip balms are the cosmetic products that the new company will sell. Skincare products: Night cream, anti-aging lotion, fairness cream, moisturizer and sun protection cream are the main skincare products that the new company will sell. Makeup cleansing lotions can also be sold by the company. Nail makeup: Nail paint and nail enamel removers are the two main products that this company will manufacture and sell. Customers Women and teenage girls are the target customers of this business. The cosmetic industry is one of the leading industries with huge number of customers. There are diverse cosmetic buyers. Different category of customer has different preferences. Aged women prefer anti-aging lotions, whereas the younger generations prefer skin brightening products and moisturizers. This company will also try to target men by producing skincare products for younger boys and men. Selling these cosmetic products through direct channels will help the business to reach to a larger group of audience. Departments The main departments in this organization will be: Production: This department will monitor the quality of the products. It will deal with inventory control and production scheduling as well as planning (Kerzner 2013). The other main responsibility of this department is to decide best method of production. Research and Development: The main concern of this department will be to develop new cosmetic products or to improve the current products as well as business processes. RD activities and marketing activities are interrelated. The focus of this department will be to produce better cosmetics for fulfilling the customer needs in an effective and efficient manner. Marketing Department: The main focus of this department will be to identify and satisfy customer needs at a reasonable price. The fundamental activity of this department will be to manage the 4Ps of marketing (Armstrong et al. 2015). The 4Ps are place, promotion, price and product. Finance Department: This department will be concerned about the monetary outflow and inflow. It will monitor the payroll system of the employees. Human Resource Management: The main aim of this department will be to hire the right people for the right jobs (Hendry 2012). This department will also be responsible for providing training to the employees in an effective manner. Organizational Structure Figure 1: Organizational Chart (Source: Created by author) Top level management: The responsibility of the top management will be to develop the overall objectives and policies of the organization. This management level will monitor the performance of the business and access all the information from various units and departments. The top management team will need strategic information from the entire organization for making long term decisions (Lunenburg 2012). This level will also require strategic information from outside the organization. Top level management will require information about the revenue generated in the entire organization and the sale of cosmetic products at various locations. It will also need information about the competitors for developing competitive strategy of the organization. Middle level management: The responsibility of the middle level managers is to make decisions based on various situations. They are responsible for making short range plans, budgets and schedules. This level deals with semi structured problems. Middle level executives will need summarized reports and exception reports. Middle level management will need information for carrying out analysis (Morse, Babcock and Murthy 2014). The middle level managers of the cosmetic business will need monthly or weekly reports regarding the sale of products so that they can analyze the reason behind high or low sales level and take effective decisions. Low level management: This is the operational management level. This management level is responsible for developing short range plans like weekly production and sales target. Structured decisions are taken by low level management. This management level will need operational information based on daily activities in order to find out exceptions for reporting it to the top level of management. MIS System: MIS Development Plan MIS development plan will facilitate the cosmetic business to perform in a more effective and efficient manner. MIS system implementation requires effective planning. The goal of MIS must support the organizational goals (Laudon and Laudon 2016). The development plan must be well documented for the benefit of the business. Problem definition and development strategy: The need for adopting MIS must be identified. The MIS system must be developed in such a manner so that it has a quick response time. The initial step will be to make a development strategy. The cosmetic business can select a real time development strategy (Leau et al. 2012). This business will be benefitted by using customized external resource or vendor for MIS development. Feasibility analysis: Technical and financial feasibility will be analyzed in this stage. Several alternatives will be developed and the best choice must be selected. Design: This phase will focus on the detailed architectural design of MIS. MIS will assist the middle level managers to collect data from the TPS and generate reports. Logical as well as physical designing of the MIS will be done in this phase. Implementation and programming: The design will be converted into programmable code for the purpose of implementation. Testing and installation: This phase will focus on testing the functionalities of the software. It will verify whether the software is fit for the business use. System testing will be followed by installation and system maintenance on a regular basis. Need for Information System This cosmetic business will need MIS for providing the managers with tools for organizing, evaluating and efficiently managing business operations (Laudon and Laudon 2016). This system will provide a centralized database to the management. MIS will be able to collect data from the lower level and enable the managers to generate summarized report. MIS is needed for effectively operating the inventory, financial, sales and HRM system of the business. MIS will enhance the satisfaction level of the customers (Bajdor and Grabara 2014). It is also required for providing up-to-date information for the development of effective strategies. This cosmetic business will require sales, budgeting, HRM system and inventory control management information system. MIS is required for supporting semi- structured and structured decision making by using internal information of the organization. The non functional requirement of MIS will be its strong security features, easy backup process, platform independence, simple process of data migration, flexible and high performance. MIS system will need HTTP for data transmission as it will use internet. Different organizational level will need different information systems (Willcocks 2013). The top management will need decision support system, the middle level managers will need the MIS and the low level managers will need TPS. Technology for Information System The cosmetic business can adopt SAP ERP software for the purpose of automating the flow of information and improving the effectiveness of the business. ERP system will integrate the information from various departments and store it in a centralized database (Leon 2014). This will enable the business to enhance its operational efficiency by streamlining the processes. It will also present accurate and real-time information to the managers for making effective decisions. Conclusion It can be concluded from this report that the proposed cosmetic business will need MIS for the purpose of generating more revenue and enhancing operational efficiency. This report showed the different informational need of the various management levels. It also gave an overview of the MIS development plan along with its various phases like problem definition, feasibility study, design and implementation. References Armstrong, G., Kotler, P., Harker, M. and Brennan, R., 2015.Marketing: an introduction. Pearson Education. Bajdor, P. and Grabara, I., 2014. The Role of Information System Flows in Fulfilling Customers Individual Orders.Journal of Studies in Social Sciences,7(2). Hendry, C., 2012.Human resource management. Routledge. Kerzner, H., 2013.Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley Sons. Laudon, K.C. and Laudon, J.P., 2016.Management information system. Pearson Education India. Leau, Y.B., Loo, W.K., Tham, W.Y. and Tan, S.F., 2012. Software development life cycle AGILE vs traditional approaches. InInternational Conference on Information and Network Technology(Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 162-167). Leon, A., 2014.Enterprise resource planning. McGraw-Hill Education. Lunenburg, F.C., 2012. Organizational structure: Mintzbergs framework.International journal of scholarly, academic, intellectual diversity,14(1), pp.1-8. Morse, L.C., Babcock, D.L. and Murthy, M., 2014.Managing engineering and technology. Pearson. Willcocks, L., 2013.Information management: the evaluation of information systems investments. Springer.