Case Study of Zara It for Fashion
Case: “Zara: IT for Fast Fashion”
Student ID: U00235538
Issue
Zara, the flagship chain of Spanish based holding company Inditex, has grown to great prominence in the international retail fashion industry. It has done so by advantage in recognizing and responding to changing fashion. Recognizing and quickly responding to the changes in fashion trends is largely achieved through a collaborative system of store managers and mid-management level commercials. The exponential growth of Zara has been upon the backbone of a reliable but increasingly antiquated IT system that begins to counterproductively threaten the speed by which the majority of the 32,535 employees operate. At the center of the technical issue is the Point of Sale (POS) system commonly used in each of Zara’s stores.
Focal Stakeholder Opinion
It is an open issue frequently in the mind of Xan Salgado Badas, the head of IT for Inditex. The current POS system exists in each store as a non networked terminal operating upon the outdated Disk Operating System (DOS). Though incredibly stable and familiar to Zara’s employees, it proves to be increasingly lacking in functionality across the current and future needs of the expanding international chain (McAfee, Dessain, Sjoman, 2). The heart of the issue is not a debate over whether to upgrade the operating system and the POS application itself, but rather when and how to facilitate such a large modernization. Salgado’s advisor Bruno Sanchez Ocampo expresses, “We could mess it up in the process. We could turn it from an application that we never have to worry about into a real headache, for us and the stores.” (McAfee, Dessain, Sjoman, 2). Zara depends so much upon speed and service by both its store managers and commercials. Its fast focus on shifting fashion up and down the chain of operations leave it especially ill able to handle IT system risk, yet Zara must find a way to achieve current technological objectives. The antiquated latency of
Student ID: U00235538
Issue
Zara, the flagship chain of Spanish based holding company Inditex, has grown to great prominence in the international retail fashion industry. It has done so by advantage in recognizing and responding to changing fashion. Recognizing and quickly responding to the changes in fashion trends is largely achieved through a collaborative system of store managers and mid-management level commercials. The exponential growth of Zara has been upon the backbone of a reliable but increasingly antiquated IT system that begins to counterproductively threaten the speed by which the majority of the 32,535 employees operate. At the center of the technical issue is the Point of Sale (POS) system commonly used in each of Zara’s stores.
Focal Stakeholder Opinion
It is an open issue frequently in the mind of Xan Salgado Badas, the head of IT for Inditex. The current POS system exists in each store as a non networked terminal operating upon the outdated Disk Operating System (DOS). Though incredibly stable and familiar to Zara’s employees, it proves to be increasingly lacking in functionality across the current and future needs of the expanding international chain (McAfee, Dessain, Sjoman, 2). The heart of the issue is not a debate over whether to upgrade the operating system and the POS application itself, but rather when and how to facilitate such a large modernization. Salgado’s advisor Bruno Sanchez Ocampo expresses, “We could mess it up in the process. We could turn it from an application that we never have to worry about into a real headache, for us and the stores.” (McAfee, Dessain, Sjoman, 2). Zara depends so much upon speed and service by both its store managers and commercials. Its fast focus on shifting fashion up and down the chain of operations leave it especially ill able to handle IT system risk, yet Zara must find a way to achieve current technological objectives. The antiquated latency of
References: Charlie S. Feld and Donna B. Stoddard. “Getting IT Right”. Harvard Business Review. February 2004. Mark Jeffery and Ingmar Leliveld. “Best Practices in IT Portfolio Management”. Sloan Management Review. Spring 2004. Andrew McAfee, Vincent Dessain, and Anders Sjomain. “Zara: IT for Fast Fashion” Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA. c. 2007 Jeanne Ross and Peter Weill. “Six IT Decisions Your IT People Shouldn’t Make”. Harvard Business Review. November 2002.