The Role of Computer Systems in Success and Failure Increasingly, winners and losers are separated by who has the best systems. Allows the cheapest and most automated techniques to be employed in production, operations, and marketing, thus lowering the cost of sales and selling, general, and administrative expenses. Allows the company to price compete against its most efficient competitors. Permits the company to flatten its organization and eliminate needless layers of analytical positions that the company's systems can routinely perform without human interaction. Systems vary from company to company and little is relayed in company documents to testify to the state of company's computer operations.
Many companies have different computer systems handling different operations.
In other words, there is no uniform Technology Audit of a business that is released to the public. A corporation may have acquired a number of companies each with different systems. A large company could have so many different systems that, in some respects, it is a model of inefficiency. Most companies have different systems handling each function, creating many clerical keystrokes to completely process, allocate, ship, and account for the transaction and update the client and inventory files. Each time data is passed from system to system there is an opportunity for a mistake.