Jia Ho Supermarket Analysis

What is your project and topic selection thinking process? (Why this particular project, but not the others.)

• Reflect what subject knowledge or skills you have learned in your previous learning you will use to conduct this project 
• What new knowledge (including domain knowledge, such as healthcare, education, etc.), technical skills, or management skills you will be gaining upon completing this project, with a decent quality or best quality
• Reflect your soft and management skills from interacting with the business owner or employees, or communication problems emerged that you have a hard time to handle, or just about anything you would like to share with the instructor) 

Report and Reflection

Project report and analysis

Jia Ho Supermarket is a supermarket in China town in Boston. It is a supermarket build by a Chinese and its commodities just like which you could find in China. Many Chinese people live in Boston go to this supermarket every week to buy their food and other life necessities. It has most Chinese commodities you want, from meat to electric equipment, so it can attract many customers, most of them are Chinese people, but there are also many local people who like Chinese food will come and buy food. It is now already a big supermarket, but it also have competitors, for instance, CVS. CVS is not far away from Jia Ho Supermarket, it can also attract many customers. It seems that in Chinatown, the customers are more likely to choose Jia Ho Supermarket, that because there are many Chinese customers in Chinatown. But if the Jia Ho wants to expend their business to other places, they should learn many things from CVS, because CVS is one of the biggest supermarket in the U.S. it is more modernized and use many information technologies. It is hard for Jia Ho to expend their business outside Chinatown if they do not have such technologies like CVS. They have the ambitions to become the biggest Chinese supermarket in Boston. Now they are using a system called MoleQ to manage their warehouse and help their cashier. I am not familiar with this system so I search it on the Internet to get more information. MoleQ is a table POS system which is designed for distributors, wholesalers, independent retailers, and retail chains. It is a single system but has very strong functions. It can help the users manage their commodities, accomplish the payment process, and even track the sell performance. It can help the users to analyze the best-sell products and some other products that the customers may not like.

CVS has two aspects that JIa Ho could learn and then they can improve a lot. The first one is self-checkout system. In CVS you can use the self-checkout system to check out quickly by yourself. It is a high efficiency for a supermarket, and also can help the supermarket to reduce the amount of cashier to save expenditure. And with this system you can find that in CVS it is hard to see there are many people stay in the line to wait for checking out. There is a CVS located at Back bay, it just has one or two cashiers to help people check out. And actually their main function is to help new customers to apply their extra paid card. Most customers use the self-checkout system to checkout, and it is very efficient. For Jia Ho Supermarket, usually there will be many customers in the supermarket from afternoon to evening, and on the weekend it will be more crowded for the whole day. At that moment, the cashiers will be so busy can have no time to rest, even so the line of checkout counter still going to be longer and longer. May be the Jia Ho supermarket can also use the self-checkout system, because it will improve the efficiency of checking out so that the employee can spend more time on the other things to service the customers.