Kudler Fine Foods recently expanded to three retail store locations serving the best gourmet foods and wines in the San Diego area. In an economy that increasingly utilizes technology to conduct business and Kudler’s rapidly changing business environment, business data collected needs to have the ability to be manipulated. The process of doing so provides management value feedback in how to hone and improve current operations. While Kudler does have current data tables in place located on the company’s intranet, the tables could be much more usable and user-friendly with a few tweaks. For example, Kudler Fine Foods uses inventory tables for “managing inventory and determining the availability of ingredients that go into prepared items, such as bakery products, etc” (University of Phoenix, 2009). At the current time, the inventory data tables are simplistic and often repetitive in nature. In the inventory data chart, many Summary Line Item entries are repeated. This should be listed in an alternate way so that managers may recognize where from and to what extent the ingredients are being purchased as well as how much is being spent on them. One way to interpret the information management need to make decisions is by looking at the way in which the data is used through an entity relationship diagram. To keep what may be an unfamiliar diagram simple, the following is an example of how the inventory data is currently being used:

[pic]

By examining this relationship, it is understandable how improvements can be made on this inventory decision-making process. One such way is creating a pivot table of the inventory data. This table is used for “an interactive table that automatically extracts, organizes, and summarizes your data. You can use this report to analyze the data, make comparisons, detect patterns and relationships, and discover trends” ("Pivottable Reports