Case study of the K mart

K-mart is a major American retail chain with a history of marketing general merchandise through discount. Sebastian Kresge and John McCroy founded the company in 1899 and opened several stores in Memphis, Tennessee, and Detroit. In 1907, Kresge became the sole owner of the stores and named them S.S Kresge Co. (“Sears Holdings,” n.d.). Therefore, K-mart was referred to as S.S Kresge Co. until 1977 when the name was changed.

During the 70’s and the 80’s, Kmart used to be a fairly good store, and the company expanded aggressively in the US. However, due to increasing competition with other discount stores and Wal-Mart – the world’s largest retailer, Kmart was declared bankrupt in 2002. This resulted in some of its stores being closed down. Kmart reorganized itself, acquired Sears and then took the name Sears Holdings Corporations. Currently, K-Mart has its headquarters in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, US. The CEO of Kmart is known as Eddie Lampert and he has served in that position since 2013 (”Sears Holdings,” n.d.).

The Importance of MIS

Recently, Kmart decided to do an upgrade on its stores to give them a more refreshing look. The new redesign of the shops divides them into three sections – clothing, kids and home. Every section of the store has its own feel and design. For instance, the kid’s section is decorated with neon coloured displays (Strang, 2015). Although Kmart has invested so much in online shopping, they still saw the need to make the shopping experience attractive and enticing to customers. The co-founder of Intel Gordon Moore predicted that technology would double after every twenty years. Moore’s law is important to businesses because it makes companies stay competitive and keep up with the ever-changing technology (Strang, 2015). Therefore, Moore’s law facilitated Kmart’s innovation because for the company to remain competitive, it must make the shopping experience appealing and enticing to its customers.

Organizational Strategy, Information Systems and Competitive Advantage.

Competitive advantage refers to the strategies employed by an organization which allows it to outperform its competitors. The first basic principle of competitive advantage is never to allow the competitors to duplicate/copy your strategy (Walker & Madsen, 2016). Cost competitive advantage is whereby a company provides a variety of goods to the target market at a lower cost. Also, companies use product/service differentiation – offering services with unique features. An organization might also decide to use niche competitive advantage which seeks to target and reach a specific segment of the market.

Kmart employs all the principles of competitive advantage, but it seems to be using the product and cost competitive advantage more. The company is known to offer general merchandise through discount. Also, by redesigning the inside of its shops, it shows that Kmart is trying to differentiate its products from those of the competitors such as Walmart. According to Walker & Madsen (2016), it is important for a company to offer something to the customers other than low prices. And this is what Kmart is currently doing by making the shopping experience appealing and enticing to its customers. Moreover, information system plays an essential role in supporting the Kmart’s competitive advantage. For instance, uses its website and social media pages to inform its customers of new products in its stores.

Hardware and Software

Database management systems are software which are used by organizations to handle the storage and retrieval of the organizations data. If Kmart cannot afford Microsoft Access, the company can decide to use MariaDB and MySQL. Al these are free DBMS which can be used by Kmart to store and retrieve its data. MySQL is available on both free and paid version.

Database Processing

MySQL and MariaDB will help the company manage its data by allowing employees to access the data. For example, the company can display its products on a website so that the customers can access the photo, prices of the products. A relational database, on the other hand, is structured into the preferred categories so that it is easy to recognize the information stored. DBMS are systems which are used for the storage and retrieval of data. DBMS helps support databases by providing an interface that makes it possible for the user of the data to create, read, retrieve and update data.

The Cloud

A data breach refers to an incident where unauthorized individuals access sensitive organizational data. In June 2017, hackers accessed Kmart’s payment data systems and introduced a malicious code to access customer’s credit cards (Alyssa, 2017). After becoming aware of this, Kmart did a data audit on its data payments system, and the security breach was contained.

References

Alyssa, N. (2017). Kmart Credit Card Breach: What You Need to Know. Retrieved from https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/kmart-credit-card-breach-what-you-need-know-n767161

Sears Holdings. (n.d.). About Kmart. Retrieved from https://searsholdings.com/about/kmart

Strang, E. (2015). Kmart refreshes its in store experience with major store redesign. Retrieved from http://theregister.co.nz/news/2015/04/kmart-refreshes-its-store-experience-major-store-redesign

Walker, G., & Madsen, T. L. (2016). Modern competitive strategy. McGraw-Hill Education.