Essay Sample on Jaguar’s Business Processes

Jaguar’s technology environment comprises of both COTS (commercial off the shelf) and bespoke applications. Information has been provided allowing us to form a view on the fitness for purpose of their application suite, and these are sufficient to support business in medium and long term. However, there appears to be a wide usage of applications within business processes, and the few of the applications supporting business processes are approaching end of life, which poses a risk to the technology environment, newly discovered security vulnerabilities can be leveraged by hackers to access the internal network and data, while software bugs can lead to a longer resolution time should the software systems suffer from relevant incidents. We understand that management have identified end of life components and put in place a plan to address them.

Application

Jaguar use EliteParks as the main ERP platform this is a SaaS based solution, removing functional duplication in the applications. This application has been customised mainly at the front-end interface. Management reports that the customisations are kept at a minimum level to minimise effort required to maintain the system and will be migrated to the standardised version by H2 FY21. In addition, 1st line support being is provided by five in-house experts from Jaguar’s Helpdesk, 2nd line support is provided by two experts in the IT team and 3rd line support as well as development is all provided by a third- party, Ellie Dynamics.

Force24 is used as the main CRM solution to support core business activities. The Jaguar IT team have worked with, a third party, to migrate the solution to D365 which fit business requirements. Force24 provides key commercial and back-office functionality such as marketing. The solution integrates with Microsoft Business central, and promotes centralised storage of data and single customer view. [We await supporting evidence from  management on status, which was planned to be completed by Aug’21]

Jaguar’s business processes are supported by several key applications, a majority of which are third party applications. This is in alignment with their “best of the breed” approach for software selection and implementation. While this approach has its benefits, it increases Jaguar’s dependency on suppliers, we would therefore expect Jaguar to have a robust vendor management framework in place to efficiently manage and monitor the performance of key vendors. However, based on the information provided the vendor selection process is in place, we recommend that Jaguar ensure key processes and technologies are documented by the vendor. To enable knowledge transfer in the event that the relationship with the vendors terminates.

As Jaguar has grown through acquisitions, it appears that there are a number of solutions supporting front-office and back-office processes, such as booking, sales, reporting, productivity which have not yet been integrated. Although Office 365 appears to be utilised across various parts of Jaguar to enable collaboration, there appear to be multiple booking systems to manage bookings(Ents and F&b table bookings) as well as a number of sales applications including Optomany, Royalty Card.  However, Jaguar has plans in place to integrate these systems for better customer experience. 

Key systems are supported by legacy infrastructure

The EPOS application is supported by Windows CE, which has been out of vendor support since 2018 and therefore pose operational and security risks, including potential network or data breaches. This could severely impact the availability/integrity of key systems and/or data.

Incident Service Management Process

Jaguar uses Hornbill ticketing system to manage their IT Incidents and Requests. Jaguar has a formal incident management process, developed based on industry best practices.