A&P IT System

1 Pages 348 Words

What problems did A&P have with its business?
A&P was once the most famous supermarket chain in the United States and it had one time the second largest revenue reported followed by General Motors in 1950. However, by 1990, this famous old America supermarket faced depression in its business mainly due to serious competition and its old information system, which could not keep up with new trends of business. Strong competitors such as Safeway, Kroger and Wal-mart have their excellent information system to help their decision makers to manage inventory efficiently and to serve customer better. In the other hand, A&P still had a number of serious problems. “Its obsolete information technology infrastructure was composed of a complex web of stitched-together old legacy systems. The company was primarily using 12- to 20-year-old software running on two large mainframe computers.” (Laudon, Pg 67). Loli explained, “We had extremely antiquated systems, from finance to merchandising to store and warehousing systems.” (Laudon, Pg 67). Basically, they had outdated software and hardware for current business transaction. According to moor’s law, every 18 month or 2 year, computer speed and capability double. At the same time, we could apply this law and same concept to computer software. Every such amount of time, computer software’s capability and speed also double, because computer hardware and software are designed to cooperate mutually. In fact, there was such a tremendous improvement and development in the software world as well as computer hardware for last few decades. It is needless to say that there was a big change and huge gap between now and twenty years ago. Therefore, A&P would have outdated its software and hardware in the information technology compared to it new competitor such as Wal-mart. It would bring inefficiency in managing inventories and responding with consumer’s demand to A&P. Information ...