Question 1

One of the most important elements of Supervalu’s success is that the company’s employed an effective and efficient information infrastructure which involves a variety of information technologies that facilitate the the process of the company’s daily management and operation. These information infrastructure has made great influence on the company to help the company reach its strategic objectives in terms of :

a) centralizing back-office processes and creating shared infrastructure through collaboration by banner presidents;
b) creating a culture of sharing by store directors across banners;
c) empowering store directors with greater autonomy.

Following are some examples that illustrate how those information facilities in Supervalu can boost the performance of the company in various ways.

1. Online Business Tool: SVHabor(*) To meet the requirement of high degree of collaboration and integration between retailers and suppliers, Supervalu’s solution is the SVHarbor Business to Business web-based portal, which brings a new series of integration, visibility and services to the supply chain. This provides a much easier and more efficient way for Supervalu to conduct business within the company by enabling its key business partners to log on to the SVHarbor portal and to choose from a variety of services so as to do everything from placing orders to viewing ad-planners with a secure, web-based method. 2. Daily Store Management Tool: iPads(**) To re-architecting the organization’s back-end system, Supervalu hands out 2,200 iPads to store managers at locations across the country for better productivity. This project’s goal is to give store directors opportunities to get back in front of their customers rather than in the back room. The store directors could use the iPad at work and at home as well to access the applications they need to get them connected to instant information at store. 3. Oracle Identity Management and Oracle Access Management The company, which runs the Solaris operating system on SPARC-based servers, has now in the process of transferring everything to Oracle Identity Management 11gR2. Along with Identity

Management 11gR2, Supervalu is offered to upgrade to Oracle Access Management (OAM), which provides user authentication cross all of a company’s application. New features that intrigued Black and Supervalu included mobility access improvements around security and single sing-on. 4. Centralized point-of-sale system at each store As part of the One Company strategy, the establishment of the Centralized POS System has completely changed the way of the organization’s operation at either management or at daily level. It helps fuel the centralizing and synchronizing back-office processes and helps creating shared infrastructure through collaboration by banner presidents.

5. Yammer: An Innovative Communication Method implemented at Supervalu to create cohesion among the executive team members. As a part of centralization program, this approach allows directors or employees working at different level within the company or at different stores to communicate in a more efficient and direct way. On the other hand, Yammer is also served as an innovative way for encouraging and improving a culture of sharing among employees over the entire company.

Question 2

By making Supervalu a more centralized company,

They improved employee training as a whole by centralizing their POS systems. Instead of having to train numerous different employees on numerous different systems throughout all of the chains owned by Supervalu, They were able to centralize the system to one unique POS system that incorporated all of the tools necessary to complete all pertinent transactions, thus boosting efficiency and making for an easier training process for the company as a whole.

By centralizing their Point of sales system they were able to