INFO 101 Assignment 2: Data Analytics Exercise

10%
Due 4th December at 5PM through the Turnitin submission Blackboard
You have set up a business selling fresh fruit and vegetables online. Your business and website
are called Fresh. The business is doing very well and you have expanded ‘vertically’ so you now
grow some of the produce in your own plots and hothouses, though you also still buy some produce
from other suppliers. You have a warehouse to store the fruit and vegetables before delivery. For
the deliveries you have a contract with a courier company. The company now employs a total of
100 staff as: - gardeners; van drivers (to move the produce from the fields to the central
warehouse); packers; staff who take order from the website and (a) give them to the packers, and
(b) arrange for the courier to deliver the order to the customer; sales and marketing staff;
accountants; HR people; and IT staff.

Write between two to four sentences as answers to EACH of the following questions. Answer the
question AND give a justification for your answer.

1.What is the ‘bargaining power of customers’ for this company? (Refer to Porter)

Contemporarily, labours have to spend a lot of time on working to earn their daily bread due to the
more difficulties in market economy leading to the lack of time for them to go to the market, visit
the grocery store where they can buy fruits and vegetables directly. Understanding this thoroughly,
we are here to build an online fruits and vegetables srore in order to encourage and help the labours
in particular and people who have no chance of directly choosing the products at store in general.
According to Porter’s five forces, this convenience is exactly the ‘bargaining power of customers’
for this company because the customers power is high when customers have many choices from
whom to buy and low when customers have few choices (Rainer, R. K, 2014, p 53 ). The
appearance of this new business type has given more choices for the customers in deciding between
traditional store and online one, in addition to increase purchasing power of customers.

2. What sort of business strategy seems best suited to this enterprise? (Refer to Porter)

E-commerce has appeared for dozens of years and it has just come back to be popular recently,
therefore, it’s somehow new to some customers who have never bought online before. Our desire
is to orient the customers to use a new product sale channel instead of going to the market or
vegetable store to select products, as now they can sit at home and click for things they want to
purchase. We focus on the convenience of the customers and make them feel simple, familiar like
going to the stores directly when they start a new online basket on our user-friendly website. We
follow Porter’s strategies for competitive advantage that we concentrate on making customers
happy and day by day changing the buyers’ habit on online market.

3. What sort of ‘tacit knowledge’ might there be in the organisation, and how could you try
to capture and store it?

At the begining of the business, we had trouble with growing our own products in our own plots
and hothouses because of the climate characteristics in Viet Nam. Our products are mainly from
New Zealand which are inherently grown in cool weather when the climate is at average from 5
degrees to 24 degrees, contrarily the tropical in Viet Nam, which we force to hybrid seeds. During
the hybridization, our team has withdrawed some experiences, also called ‘tacit knowledge’, we
find that conformable hybrids depend on many factors and determine the right time to harvest, the
right time to water plants at each season will be the most important factor to a productive harvest.
We recorded all the daily changes of the tree during the trial, thus forming a diary and circulating
internally to further develop and perfect the product.

4. Describe one internal transactional data source you will have.

On our website, there is a section called shopping cart, when customers complete the selection of
the product, the number of products will show on the cart image. After selecting products,
customers click to the cart, it will show the list of products that customers have selected, including
quantity, product name and price. Customers can go to the payment section after checking and
filling out the necessary information for the delivery and payment data that we have set up on the
website. Here, information selected from the customers can take to analyze the shopping trends of
customers and glean important insights, including ways to reduce spending and remain on budget,
as well as crucial patterns pertaining to customers buying habits and shopping preferences (
Aunalytics, 2016 ).
5. Describe one internal non-transactional data source you will have.

The data that the customers provide will be kept as the internal non-transactional source. When
customers regist to our website, we will ask for personal information and form an account with
their own password. At the next purchasing, they just need to log in their account and the exactly
information they have saved before will be shown on the screen. The customer's name and contact
details will be stored for customer statistic that we can use to coordinate the products and target
the potential customers.

6. Describe one external data source you are very likely to use.

To evaluate the shopping behaviours of customers, we usually use the external data source from
gorvernment. We use mostly surveys about people and top trending to catch up the tastes of
consumers. In addition, these surveys help us answer the questions how much time per day
people spend on shopping online so that we can promote our website effectively, what is the
average per capita income so that we can we can price the products easily. Weather forecast from
hydro-meteorological station is also helpful to calculate the perfect time to harvest.

7. Select one of the sources you described in your answer to questions 4, 5 and 6. What sort
of outputs (e.g. reports) would you want to get from that data source, and why?

I believe in “ Well begun is half done”, so that a good start is very important to me. To start a
company, using the external data source to calculate the risk that I can face off is essential. Through
searching many sources, statistics are required to assess the likelihood of success and find out what
to do next to complete the business. Statistics also give compararison between years to years, so
that we can analyze the trending and predict the trending in the future.

8. For the future you are thinking about having your own fleet of vehicles to do the
deliveries. What sort of data will you need to help you decide if this is a sensible business
decision?

After running the company for a while, depending on the internal non-transactional data source, I
know the number of customers that i have, then I can give a decision to have my own fleet of
vehicles to do the deliveries or not. If I have a large enough volume of customers, having my own
fleet of vehicles to do the deliveries will save the shipping fee and I can be more proactive in
delivering.
Reference list:

Aunalytics. (2016). Understanding Analytics Part 1: Top Internal Sources of Big Data . Retrieved
from https://www.aunalytics.com/2016/08/11/understanding-analytics-part-1-top-internal-
sources-of-big-data/ .

Rainer, R. K. (2014). Management information systems (Interactive), First Edition.

[VitalSource]. Retrieved from https://bookshelf.vitalsource.com/#/books/9780730319252/ .