Website for Kudler Fine Foods Essays

Website for Kudler Fine Foods Essays Website for Kudler Fine Foods Essay Website for Kudler Fine Foods Essay Kudler Fine Foods (KFF) mission is to provide customers the best produce, wines, and associated needs in an unparalleled customer setting. Kudler brings its customers the finest products from around the world. Kudler Fine Foods wants to improve the functionality of their current website to be more competitive and to offer their unique products to customers everywhere. History The founder of Kudler Fine Foods is Kathy Kudler; she brings knowledge from a previous career as a vice president of marketing. As Kathy relieved her stress by gourmet cooking, she found it hard to find all ingredients in one place. Kathy recognizing a need for an upscale gourmet store in La Jolla, CA, she sought financing with a business plan in hand, and opened her first business June 18, 1998. To Kathy’s surprise, the store was profitable within the first nine months. In 2000, Del Mar became the location for the second store and a third store in Encinitas was in operation in 2003. Kudler Fine Foods is now ready to offer these great products to customers around the world with a new e-commerce website. Sales and Marketing Kudler Fine Foods is experiencing growth in the gourmet market, the time has come to grow in the service area, improve upon the effectiveness of its business and increase loyalty and profitability by increasing the purchasing power of its consumers. If the opportunity is favorable, Kudler Fine Foods will launch stores in Florida and Connecticut. Kudler Fine Foods focus has been on the development of services to the customer and adding a frequent shopper program to help increase profits. Now the business will incorporate the frequent shopping program and sales into the new web design that will take Kudler Fine Foods to the next level of business opportunities. Point of Sale The current Point of Sale (POS) module is NCR RealPOS 30; it gathers customer files and details of items purchased. The POS system permits growth with ecommerce; it can capture the same information online as well as in-store purchases. The new website will interface with the current POS system. Gathering customer information brings on the responsibility to guard personal information. Modern businesses deal with an elaborate system of laws and regulations. Business owners cannot survive without basic knowledge of these laws and regulations. KFF’s business has superior ethics that inspiring to do what is best for the customer, not just try to make a profit. Frequent Shopper Program Kudler Fine Food’s tracks the purchase behavior of the customer at the individual level. KFF provides incentives from joint ventures with companies with a program based on points accumulated from purchases. Kudler customers are not focusing on price; they want quality and variety of gourmet foods. The web is a great place to offer such merchandise to customers by using pictures and videos to offer how- to on using gourmet foods. The firm’s relational attitude often comes to life by the articulation of frontline employees whose characteristics and behaviors’ can apply considerable impact on the results of interactions with the customers according to Arbore, Guenzi, and Ordanini (2007). The same is true with service level for a website; the site must also meet all the needs of the customer. Focus Group The focus group for the development of an e-commerce website will be Kathy Kudler, the Director of store operations, sales staff, accounting clerk, computer support specialist, purchasing manager and IT staff. According to Woodward (2008), a website can expand a company’s geographical reach and its ability to provide customer service at a low cost. Current System The current system is a Norvell 4. 11 server with four POS windows PC’s at each location with a 56k modem connected to the Internet and each store has a standalone UPS modem. La Jolla and Del Mar each have a PC with PII NT server with built-in modem and cd-rom reader and a PC with PC 64 mg ram with windows and office 97 using server, a bubble jet printer and a stand along cd burner. Purpose Kudler Fine Foods is a unique type of store with a unique clientele. There are very few specialty stores in the United States so the use of a website will open a new business to web users to obtain gourmet foods delivered right to their doorstep. In staying with their specialty branding, Kindler’s executives and the sales and marketing department are enthusiastic about the se of the e-commerce website. Detail Design Kudler will need to implement an up-to-date server. We recommend that a server be purchased and the current one scrapped. The server will also need to run a more up-to-date version of the Windows operating system. I recommend Windows server either 2003 or 2008. I chose the Windows server edition because of the company’s already existing famili arity with the Windows server operating system. I also believe that learning the Linux operating system might slow down business operations and this is why in this situation a newer version of Windows would be a more reliable choice. Windows Server 2008 R2 builds on the successes and strengths of its Windows Server predecessors while delivering valuable new functionality and powerful improvements to the base operating system. New Web tools, virtualization technologies, security enhancements, and management utilities help save time, reduce costs, and provide a solid foundation for the information technology (IT) infrastructure (Microsoft. com, 2009). After the purchase of a server, and the launch of the website, we can keep the Kudler Fine Food checkout lanes open around the clock. The website will be written in hypertext mark-up language (HTML). Html is the standard programming language that information for the web is created in. The site will include JavaScript and Ajax with Meta tags to help search engines keep Kudler Fine Foods at the top of search results. We recommend that we change the current Internet access from a 56k dial up modem to modern like a high-speed xdsl or cable internet access. In addition, other options available, but I think cable or xdsl Internet access will give Kudler more than enough Internet bandwidth. This will enable the Kudler website to handle the traffic to their site in a faster manner. The modem upgrade will also enable the company server to send e-mail without worrying about the bottlenecking or choke points that occur due to the limited amount of bandwidth that is available to a dial up network. This will also be an improvement for those employees who need to access the network remotely. After signing up at the website, the customer will have agreed that his or her actions will be tracked while on the website via the user agreement or the terms of service. This will help Kudler tailor its business around the user. This will be more effective because Kudler can suggest the items that the customer is most interested in, and offer deals on those specific products. I believe that this will result in more customers who are pleased with their experience at the Kudler website and more sales for Kudler. This service will also enable customers to create online shopping list, and enable them to pay from home and pick up in store or have the items shipped. Test Process summary After all code is tested, a testing environment will be set up for users to test all web pages on different browsers. Testing for the website will be done using IT staff and in house employees. The functionality must appear seamless while the system must integrate with all aspects of the current POS system with enterprise wide software, online shopping and the Content Delivery Network (CDN). According to O’ Kennon (2010), using (CDN) as a server hosted by a third party, the content will be geographically closer to the users that request the content of the Website from Kudler Fine Foods. This will provide high-quality service quickly to keep the users attention. Software To start the testing, using the website interface and database software, the first step is the testing of the enterprise wide analytics software by integrating the current Access database; this will help expedite the testing and integrating tasks. The current Access database contains all vital records to the company. The enterprise wide software must be able to show the important fields within the database for each department. Testing of this software will be conducted offline to ensure the proper interfacing to the purchasing system works. Sales employees communicate with the customers; they would have firsthand knowledge of what the customer likes. If all looks good offline, then once the server is up and running transition to the website interface will begin. Hardware During the software coding, hardware testing will be used to validate the proper transition. A new server will be purchased and tested within the Kudler system as an addition. Once the server seems viable transferring information from the old servers to the new one will begin. As the software becomes available all testing between hardware will be with the new server. This will ensure that no additional testing will be needed on unused hardware. Testing will include data transfer and communication between location and external Internet connectivity. Support and Maintenance Summary Because Kudler Fine Foods is a smaller company, an offsite support company or outsourcing would make better business sense. The company does not have to employ a service person to maintain the website as well as any hardware for the system. This will be a cost savings for the company; in the event that hardware has problems, they can inform the support company. A super user at each location will help other employees and customers if they have issue that come up with the website. References Arbore, A. Guenzi, P. and Ordanini, A. (October 12, 2007). Loyalty building, relational trade-offs and key service employees: the case of radio DJs. Emerald Journal retrieved April 23, 2010 from the University of Phoenix Microsoft. com. (2009). Microsoft Windows Server Edition 2008R2 Product Information. Retrieved April 23, 2010 from microsoft. com/windowsserver2008/en/us/product-information. aspx O’Kennon, C. (2010). Content Delivery Networks. Retrieved May 7, 2010 from apollolibrary. com/Library/err/ElectronicReserveReadings. aspx. Woodward, K. (2008). Evaluating Web Site Goals and Needs. Retrieved May 7, 2010 from apollolibrary. com/Library/err/ElectronicReserveReadings. aspx.