This paper will be presented from the perspective of an employee of the company Party Plates, a company that manufactures decorative plates and napkins for special events. The president of the company has tasked this employee with improving the efficiency of the current information system used by the sales department. The organization currently utilizes Microsoft Excel for tracking purposes, but would prefer to use Microsoft Access to do so. In order to complete the report, potential collaborative software must be identified for the purposes of improving internal communications and assisting in the streamlining of the work process of the sales department. The report will address the potential implementation of the new information systems within the organization.

Keywords: communication, collaborative software, Party Plates, efficiency and collaboration proposal, implementation, information systems

In order to be able to work to increase the overall efficiency of the sales division at Party Plates, it becomes necessary to work to implement new information systems and collaborative software within the organization. The company’s sales department currently utilizes Microsoft Excel in order to track personnel data, but recent years have shown this method to be increasingly inefficient due to the fact that only one person may update the file at a time, and as a result of the fact that the document itself is not as intuitive as it could be. In order to work to increase the overall efficiency, it is recommended that Party Plates switch their personnel data over into a relational database created in Microsoft Access, thus ensuring its ability to be accessed, manipulated, and updated by multiple users from multiple locations simultaneously. The adoption of this software will work to increase the overall efficiency of the sales department drastically.

In order to increase the overall levels of collaboration and communication within the sales department, it is recommended that the company opt to utilize either Spark or mIRC for communicative purposes. Either program will allow users to join in a one on one conversation with other employees, or will allow for a conversation held between multiple individuals simultaneously without ever necessitating employees getting up from their desks. This ability to communicate simultaneously, in real time, with all or some of the other employees in the sales department will allow for increased productivity while at the same time working to foster an increased sense of collaboration, thus ensuring that the overall success of the organization is increased as well. The implementation of these information systems will work to further the company as a whole while increasing the productivity of the sales team.