BUSINESS ORGANISATION AND POLICY

Business Organisation and Policy



Business Organisation and Policy

Introduction

Self-service checkouts have been steadily rising in number since British supermarket giant Tesco introduced the technology in the UK in 2010, with the aim of making paying for groceries much more efficient. From less than 100,000 terminals throughout the world back in 2008 to nearly half a million installed today, they have gone through many changes in this short period, vastly improving in speed and accuracy.

Self-service checkouts come in many shapes and sizes, depending on the floor space available, but usually consist of four main sections: the barcode scanner, touchscreen display, bagging area and the payment terminal. Barcode scanners feature a wipe-friendly surface and see-through panel over which items are passed to be logged. Beneath this panel are components that illuminate, scan, convert and then decode the barcode, swiftly passing data back and forth between the till and its host computer or data centre. Items that can't be barcoded (for example, loose fruit and veg) can be selected manually via a touchscreen display.

Loose items must also be weighed using a pressure pad that matches the item against its expected weight. If this does not happen, the customer and supervisor are both alerted with the now-familiar “unexpected item in the bagging area' warning. Otherwise, it's simply a matter of paying, using a combination of debit/credit card reader, note reader and coin counter to check and verify the payment. Despite improvements in accuracy and speed, the advantages of self-checkouts are debated. Certainly, one operator monitoring up to six tills means lower staff costs. However, for some consumers human interaction is a vital part of the shopping experience and, in busy periods, you can end up waiting longer than normal if the machine has a fault.

Business integration requires the alignment of strategies, objectives, processes, system and the information technology infrastructure and the international coordination of functional make use of information technology. The alignment requires coordination and a set of methods layout to represent different aspects of business to meet certain purposes. Today, customers are more demanding in terms of price, service and quality. This forces company to meet user requirement through reducing time to market, lower production costs and improve the quality of their products; likewise, must comply with regulations (Blois, 1972, Pp. 253).

Literature Review

The review of related literature in this research is grouped into four main sections. Section 1 reviews literature that discusses the factors that influence the length of time customers spend in checkout lines and how these factors affect customers' shopping preferences. Section 2 reviews literature on how ?queuing theory? and ?waiting line techniques? help store managersminimize the amount of time customers spend in checkout lines. Section 3 reviews the literature on the factors that influence the decision-making processes of managers in their effort to choose between increasing the number of cashier checkout stations or replacing them with electronic self checkout systems. Finally, Section 4 summarizes the major factors that contribute to longer than expected waits in checkout lines ...