Case Study Analysis: Case Analysis Of Zara

Preface

Zara is a successful multinational clothing company, having most of its shops in Europe. Since opening the first store in Spain, Zara now has over 1,700 stores all over the world and is famous for being able to develop products and have them available in stores within two weeks, way above the average rate for the fashion industry of around six months.

The company operates on a zero advertising policy which means that it has to keep attracting customers in other ways in order to keep making profits and stay relevant in face of tough competition from similar companies.

Requirements for the IT System

During the analysis of the case, several functional and non-functional requirements for the new IT system were identified. The fact that

It 's essential for the system to be able to collect and analyze stored sales data for reaching valuable conclusions.

 Real-time data collection: As a complimentary function for the reporting ability.

 Semantic knowledge base integration: To augment the results of the structured data reporting ability and reach more accurate conclusions, the new system should integrate semantic technologies to build and maintain a knowledge base of unstructured data such as fashion trends and customer opinions residing on the web (e.g. fora, social networks, etc) .

 Workflow Integration: For business process modeling and automization. This is a fundamental requirement for supporting and enhancing the business operation from one end to another.

 Case Management: A case management system supporting issue tracking, ticket management, operator coordination should be implemented for both in-business and customer related issues. Non-efficient case management could lead to customer loss and therefore profit decrease.

 Non-Functional Requirements

 Availability: The system should reach 100% availability rate. Low availability means potential profit

It is very important to focus on the way data is entered, stored and managed. Data categories such as master data and transactional data are essential for the smooth operation of a firm.

 Master data represent business elements that are common in more than one transactional application. Master data describe people such as customers, employees, vendors, products such as name of the item, color, size, flavor, weight, volume, brand and location such as store, depot, delivery location, sales territories.

The quality of the data must focus on the accuracy and reliability. There must be no doubts on the question “is this what we did?”

 “Transactional data describe an internal or external event or transaction that takes place as an organization conducts its business” (McGilvray,2008) Transactional data include orders such as purchase orders, acknowledgement, delivery advice, invoice, shipping documents etc.

The quality of the data must focus on the accuracy and completeness. There must be accuracy and detail on questions like “Who bought, what and where?”.

IT System