Zara: It for Fast Fashion

Zara: IT for Fast Fashion

Zara is the largest chain of stores of Inditex. The first store was opened in 1975 in La Coruan in Spain, and the city now had become the central headquarter for Zara. Zara is in a business model based on short deadlines, and a great choice of style and clothes targeted on young, fashion-conscious city dwellers.

Although Zara’s advantage over its competitors is not so much a result of IT leverage, the sustainability of its competiveness will be at risk due to a lack of IT investment. Zara’s current most important aspect of its approach to IT is the Stores, which is the personal digital assistants (PDAs) and POS system.

How should Zara proceed on the issue of upgrading POS system?

Zara is now confronted with a problem: The POS (Point of Sale) that they are using runs on DOS, which is an outdated system, and Microsoft doesn’t support this system anymore. Also, the POS terminal will not be compatible with the current POS software. Though there will be considerable amount of risks and costs to implement Salgodo’s updating proposal, I believe change is inevitable because the company needs to invest in IT infrastructure to be sustainable and competitive. However, it requires a formal and detailed planning, budgeting and cost analysis in the upfront phase. Moreover, even though Zara depends mostly on internal software development, I propose that Zara should outsource this project to a third party in order to achieve a successful implement in a relatively short time.

MS DOS is an obsolete technology. Microsoft originally released it in 1981 for IBM computers, and the latest version of MS-DOS is MS-DOS 6.22, which was released in 1994. The most recent version being more than 10 years old, DOS is an old system and will not provide you the software selection that other operating systems might offer. The POS terminal does not guarantee that they will continue to supply the same terminal without any changes in the...