Carter Supplies buys and sells office stationery and supplies. It follows a cost leadership strategy, seeking to provide customers with market-beating prices. Recently as a new graduate accountant in the company, Luke was asked to look into a potential replacement for the company’s current purchasing system.

Luke has heard of a “wonderful” purchasing system from a friend of his working for a vendor company that specialises in AIS for retail businesses. This system enables an automatic inventory level check and forward of purchase requests to purchasing department. Further, it facilitates counting in the receiving process by using the scanners to scan bar codes on received items. The systems costs $20,000 to buy and about $10,000 in annual maintenance costs.

Luke's proposal to buy the system was quickly approved by the top management. Two IT consultants from the vendor came, installed the system and did an intensive 3-hour training session for staff. However, due to the rushed scheduling of the training, many staff who use the system on the daily basis were not able to attend. After the consultants left, Luke found himself spending days in different departments providing help to staff that have difficulty understanding and using the system. Though the system enables the automatic check of inventory levels it creates a lot of spare time for inventory control clerks who just end up going into the system and redo the checking of inventory levels anyway. Receiving clerks also complain as the scanners sometimes do not work in the normal warehouse temperature and fail to send information on the received quantity to the purchasing system. Apart from Inventory control department, staff from other departments hate the new system and continue to send paper or email-based purchase requests, causing extra work for Purchasing clerks to enter purchase requests into the new system.

The extended lockdown in Sydney has caused significant delays to onsite staff training with the new system. A couple of scheduled stocktakes were also postponed. Different departments reverted to sending all purchase requests by email, which overloaded purchasing clerks. In response, Luke has changed the access controls of the new system to allow inventory control staff to help enter purchase requests and convert them into purchase orders.

Required

Answer the following questions:

a) What are three (3) steps Luke should have taken to ensure that end-user needs were satisfied in the new purchasing system? 

b) What are the four (4) types of the feasibility analysis that would have better informed Luke's decision to buy the new purchasing system?

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

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