Kudler Fine Foods Frequent Shopper Program

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Kudler Fine Foods – Frequent Shopper Program

Current Business Process

Kudler Fine Foods was established by Kathy Kudler in 1998 and has since grown into a small franchise in southern California consisting of three locations.

Kathy Kudler works very hard and currently runs all aspects of her business from the ordering of products to the yearly budget and sales forecasting. She works seven days a week and just recently hired the help of store managers and assistant managers to aid her with the work. Currently the managers handle a lot of the day to day work including managing the stores stay within budgets and operating expenses. The managers control the schedules; price store items per the corporate guidelines, responsible for managing inventories and handling all cash and sales and even fills in for employees if needed.        

Kathy Kudler is still in charge of ordering for all stores because she buys in bulk for all three. Also the buildings that she uses for all three locations are not owned they are actually all leased.

Scope of the project

Kudler Fine Foods has requested the development of a system to track customer purchases through a Frequent Shopper Program that will award loyalty points for redemption. This loyalty program will work dually for Kudler Fine Foods to help them track customer purchases for increased productivity in ordering and inventory management.

Currently all three locations will be included in the project so that a customer can shop at any location and their purchases tracked as well as allow management  to track the purchases from  each individual location.

There will need to be new hardware installed at each location with software updates and training for all employees to ease the transition.

Currently the stores marketing and personnel departments will not be affected.

Project Constraints

Currently there appear to be no project constraints that are foreseen. Financially Kudler is able to handle the transition with profit margins doing quite well.  There was no time frame given for the project but the estimation is going to be approximately six months. The resources are available (hardware availability, WAN software, utility functions such as high speed cable and/or DSL). Based on an overview of Kudler Fine Foods corporate policies and the culture of those that are employed by the company the employees are eager to help in the transition to the new system.

Statement of Scope and Goals

Kudler Fine Foods is currently a successful business but they seem to be losing focus on the important things such as customer satisfaction and prioritize their tasks to maximize their objectives for the fiscal year.  This being the case the manager has inquired about the possible development of a system to track customer purchases through a frequent shopper program to award loyalty points for redemption. This will track purchases of individuals to refine the ordering process of inventory items.  The expectation of a successful frequent shoppers program will assist with customer satisfaction scores as well as assisting in the inventory management of the Kudler Fine Foods chain. The main assumption is that customers are not interested in money (discounts) but in fact they want quality. The frequent shopper program plan will allow Kudler to more accurately order to satisfy those needs. Only unforeseen limitations at this time may be customers’ cooperation for trails of the new system.

Supporting Measures for Success

Kudler Fines Foods has served customers and is one of the leading domestic food businesses in the San Diego area.  In an effort to improve customer satisfaction and broaden the scope of Kudler’s clientele the Frequent Shopper Program has been developed to track purchases.  Therefore, it is important to redefine the current systems function and discuss implementing new or upgraded systems software.  Thus, this is an effort to increase the success rate of the measures employed to increase customer satisfaction.  First, various personnel have been interviewed to establish a basic knowledge of individual system processes.  Some different methods being used are interviews, which are very helpful, observation, questionnaires, and the use of the Joint Applications Designs (JAD).    Moreover, we believe that this approach to systems development is a must in the early stages to give direction to gathering of system information.  JAD includes interviews of Kudler stakeholders and detailed notes with some charting of the information.   Another important key measure to successfully accessing the success of Kudler’s outreach to their customers is the use of activity diagrams.  Diagrams will also be used in charting vendor information and plotting the status as system development unfolds including the Entity-Relationship Diagram, which is very good for charting customer orders.  Overall, there are multiple ways to measure the success of Kudler’s system development all of which when communicated will increase current system.

Summary of Project Feasibility

Operational feasibility will include normal operating costs that are incurred each year for the new system. Such as the connectivity needed to the current network and the added bandwidth needed for the added traffic should be included. Equipment maintenance support agreements and regular replacement schedule will also be a factor. This agreement will also include any addition software upgrade or license renewal incurred as well as any programming support needed. This will also include any Kudler technical support employee that will do any system maintenance. Operational cost will also include the routine supplies such as the frequent customer card along with ongoing training current and new employees to the Kudler chain. Figure 1 shows the operational feasibility summary.

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Summary of Annual Operating Cost

Recurring expenses        Amount

Connectivity        $25,000

Equipment Maintenance        $35,000

Programming        $5,000

Supplies        $5,000

Total recurring cost        $70,000

        Figure 1

Technical feasibility shows that this project will impact the current Access database used to keep record or customer information. With this new system, an integration of this database should be migrated to a more streamlined database such as Oracle. This new database system in also incorporate an all-in-one application in which the current Access tables will be migrated to. A team will need to be formed to implement the new database system. This will include a new ...

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