ABSTRACT:

The supermarket industry has been a major, but not the most aggressive user of information systems. This paper presents the case of a super market company in which long range planning and investments for information technology were limited. Furthermore, their software had not kept pace with the installation of the state-of-the-art hardware. The existing application systems resembled a patch work quilt. Reports suffered the well known affliction of having multiple versions of the truth.

After an initial analysis, this study concluded that a key critical success factor to sustained growth was to develop an information system for the volatile and very profitable Produce Department of this supermarket company. A PC-based system was developed and implemented by the end-users with the help of an outside consultant. This paper describes this system and documents certain lessons learned for developing PC-based prototype (or final) information system applications by end-users.