Zara It Strategies for Retail Essay

They are women with incomes of $25,000 or more a year that care about their appearance and spend money on beauty products. They tend to have curly or frizzy hair. They are women that tend to use beauty salons and keep up with fashion and fashion trends.

Hence, technology is bettering reliability and speed with which information is divulged (Porter, 1980). Hand-held computers or PDA’s are utilized by Zara to collect information on consumer needs between retail stores and the factory in La Coruna. This along with regular telephone conversations between store managers and marketing specialists are one of the reasons that Zara’s information network is so effective. The utilization of PDA’s can be done by any company; it is Zara’s determination not to allow important information to fall by the wayside that assists with its success. PDAs are connected to the store 's point-of-sale (POS) system, enabling managers to see how garments rank by sales. In as little as an hour, managers can send information that combine the hard data captured at the POS intermixed with acumen on what customers would like to see. All of this data allows Zara to design and produce styles and orders based on feedback rather than guesswork. Hence, Zara avoids costly overproduction and the consequent sales and mark-downs that are so widespread in the fast fashion industry (Rohwedder and Johnson, 2008).

Yes, the POS terminals were out-dated and were being backed by DOS operating system which Microsoft no longer supported. They are running a risk of the product becoming obsolete and being unable to maintain support from vendors. Up-to-date operating system would provide more user friendly mechanisms, more functionality, thus allowing effective communication between stores and headquarters. New modern operating systems would allow simple standardisation and sharing of data across the board. Modern operating systems also provide more security platforms (such as credit card details), inventory management, and report generation for decision making. Also it allows real time transactions to be recorded.

Zappos’ primary selling base is shoes, which accounts for about 80% of its business. There are currently about 50,000 varieties of shoes sold in the Zappos store, from brands like Nike, Ugg boots, ALDO Shoes, and Steve Madden heels. They also serve the niche shoe markets, including narrow and wide widths, hard-to-find sizes, American-made shoes, and vegan shoes. In 2004, they launched a second line of high-end shoes called Zappos Couture.

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With which of the international competitors listed in the case is it most interesting to compare Inditex’s financial results? What do comparisons indicate about Inditex’s relative operating economics? Its relative capital efficiency?

National Computer Operations (NCO) was an internal, monopolizing computer support entity that was faced with a challenge which was presented by the new banks chainman. The change, which was to take effect in 2 years, was that NCO could now market externally and all the internal departments could buy computer services from outside firms (Spector, 2013, p. 73). How was the company leader, Gar Finnvold, going to overcome these changes? The following essay will discuss a step by step diagnosis for the organization, as well as, who and what tools will be utilized. Additionally, the essay will describe who and what tools will be utilized.

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Zara’s IT was positioned in the support mode quadrant on the IT strategic impact grid. This demonstrates that Zara's leadership team understood that their corporate strategy focused on the expansion of the number of stores selling of high fashion, short life span clothing to young fashion conscious, city dwellers. There was a relatively low need for reliability and strategic IT, it simply existed to support employees activities (Nolan and McFarlan, 2005). By implementing a new POS system Zara could potentially have come up against the following key risks:

It might not be in the retailer’s best interest to perform such upgrade, as the new system will replace three of the existing legacy systems in terms of ordering and fulfillment. The IS department will perceive such upgrade as a radical move and is expected to show high resistance in response to it. Even though Zara has a decentralized decision making process, the retailer’s IS department exercises absolute autonomy on the IT infrastructure and design. The fact that “only one person had left the department” in the past 10 years further confirms that the retailer is suffering from cognitive and action inertia, and thus creating a huge barrier for such

General Nutrition Companies, INC. was founded in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania by David Shakarian in 1935 as a single, specialized, general health retail store (Histories, 2011). Since

In this paper, the author will introduce a failure case of K-Mart 's IT modernization system project. In 2001, K-mart took $1.4 billion dollars into this project with the purpose of competing with its rival Walmart. The dream is beautiful, but the real work is cruel. After 18 months, the project was failed because of lacking of cash. What happened in the detailed for this project? $1.4 billion dollar is huge numbers, why it was still not enough to pay and distribute for this project? How did its project manager do in this project? What are the project problems? How can we learn from the failure of this case? The paper includes the case background introduction, the project development process, the problems in the project, analysis and

The core concept of Zara 's business model is they sell "medium quality fashion clothing at affordable prices", and vertical integration and quick-response is key to Zara 's business model.  Through the entire process of Zara 's business system: designing, sourcing and manufacturing, distribution and retailing, they presented four fundamental success factors: short cycle time, small batches per product, extensive variety of product every season and heavy investment in information and communication technology.  These four elements are involved in every aspect of the business.

Zara is a Spanish brand of clothing founded by the visionary Amancio Ortega Gaona and Rosalia Mera in Artexio, Galicia. Zara was founded in the year 1975. It is one of the major selling brands of one of the biggest fashion retailer "INDITEX". Zara is now available in 86 countries with total of 1,763 stores worldwide.

Amancio Ortega, had a simple idea of linking customer demand to manufacturing and manufacturing with distribution, when creating ZARA in 1975 in la Coruña, Spain Zara came under the holding company Inditex in the year 1985 and is today the biggest fashion brand of the group. Zara believes that the prime factors for running a successful business are quick response to customers, use of computers, and disintegrated decision-making (McAfee, Dessain, & Sjoman, 2007)