MIS (Assignment 1)

Experience can be described as the best way of learning. Definitely! We’ve learned much on our experiences. There are many things that we can never find in the four corners of our house and classrooms. This is what we are practicing in our two subjects this semester. Explore outside the class with regards to Human Resource Management and Management Information System, we are going to update ourselves from posted information through sites online.

In this connection, our first assignment in both subjects is to look for local organizations and discus their best practices in their MIS and HRM Department. We have to propose companies and wait the approval of our professor before we can conduct an ambush interview in their department. Luckily, my proposed company has been approved last July 3, 2009. For the MIS requirement, I have chosen EMCOR Incorporated as my proponent. This will tackle on their best practices in Management Information System (MIS) and the risks associated with business and IS/IT change. But before going down to our discussions, let me give you a brief introduction about EMCOR Incorporated.

EMCOR

EMCOR is a 100% Filipino-owned retail Business Corporation specializing in appliances, furniture, IT products, motorcycles, and money transfer through its network of specialty chain stores in the Visayas, Mindanao, and Palawan areas. With the launching of our online store, EMCOR will now be making its presence known in the online industry and promote its company’s goals and vision to the global community.

EMCOR was founded by JESUS V. del ROSARIO in 1958 and we are currently under the JVR Foundation Inc.—one of the many companies of the JVR Group of Companies. Others include:

• Kawasaki Motors (Philippines) Corporation
• K-Servico Trade, Incorporated
• Wodel Incorporated
• Delsa Chemicals and Multi Products Incorporated
• International Wiring Systems Philippines Corporation
• Hecny Forwarders Incorporated
• Wodel Manpower Services

We carry a wide array of product lines like Panasonic, JVC, Philips, Sony, Sharp, Samsung, Electrolux, La Germania, Whirlpool, FS Furniture, Sanyo, Canon, Brother, Epson, Toshiba, Acer, Kawasaki, Honda, Suzuki and many others. We have also partnered with Western Union for our money transfer services. The core of our existence is our ability to provide high quality service to our customers by providing the right products at the right time, in the right place and at the right price.

We believe that as responsible members of our society, we at EMCOR should pursue our profit objectives in the spirit of service to the community. We believe in reconciling the profit motive of our Company with service to the nation. Thus, we strive to maintain a balance between the interests of our customers, employees, shareholders and the government by supporting national and local agenda for economic development, social reform, educational/scientific research, healthcare and environmental sanitation and preservation. To date, the JVR Foundation has given more than PhP200 Million in philanthropic work.

SERVICES:

1.) Motorcycle Repair

2.) Airconditioning Cleaning

3.) Appliance Repair

4.) Customer Inquiries

Source: http://www.emcor.com.ph/about.php

To give a technical background, EMCOR started to use a manual operation in the early years. It was during the year 1997 that the systems was started to develop. Before the year 2000 took its final fold, they were able to implement the Clipper 87 software for the receivables and inventory. It was then that they realized that the problem on the coming of Y2K could affect their system. Later, they were able to migrate another system with the FoxPRo as their front-end and SQL as their back-end. They’re using MS Windows environment. Hopefully, the long-planned migration to another system would be realized by the end of this year or earlier. It will be a SAP package (I forgot to ask what does it stands for) that includes Sales and Collection Monitoring System that will have to centralize their database in order to render best services to their clientele. Also, they are planning to establish a disaster recovery site that would deal all the transactions taken in case of unintentional shutdown and data loss.

Below are the formulated questions regarding the Management Information System (MIS) of the company’s MIS/EDP that was entertained by the personnel manager himself. He was trained in Digital Interface about programming during his early years in the company and was the first user of the computer in their company.

1.) What are the best practices in Management Information System (MIS) in their company?

According to the interviewee, it is hard to point out if what are the best practices that their department has done to attain their goals but he tries to consider some of their practices that he believes would be best. Like those having back-ups of data in case of unexpected disaster that they might encounter. They have a data security that secures all the data. And also having enough programmers and system analyst who are responsible to control, update, and checked whatever errors that might occurs. They have a Disaster Recovery Procedure that will immediately recover the data in any case that the server might have encounter problems.

2.) What are the advantages of their Management Information System (MIS) in the company?

Since the company has been using VPN (Virtual Private Network) connections, there is an accurate and fast transferring of data from one store to another and also, since it is private, it is not prone to hacking and stealing of important data. Also it reduces cost and it saves time since transactions will happened too fast than usual.

3.) What are the disadvantages?

One disadvantage is the incorrect data uploading and this would happen usually in system migration. Anyway it’s not really a big problem since they are looking for solutions to possible errors.

4.) Do you think, you won't come this far without this Management Information System (MIS)?

The interviewee says that even without technology, MIS would still exist though not as easy and reliable as of this time. There would still be an MIS, maybe dealing with manual system. But having the opportunity to take advantage of the fast growing technology, MIS also evolves into a more accurate and fast applications that helps the MIS department to achieve its goals with the use of high level techniques and implementations.
The said meeting with the Personnel Manager (as he was quoted yesterday and take note, at EMCOR’s conference room?hehehe...palangga gid!) ended with photo shots. Also, we are allowed to see their IBM X3950 hardware which serves as their server. It’s a large machine connected with other three small computers (serves as a back-ups). It looks like a large Power system case.