MIS and its Importance

If the labor that goes into the MIS should be worth the while, the MIS should
turn out all the information that is needed for decision making. It must come
to the decision makers in the manner and form in which they need it and at
the time they need it. When the MIS is designed and operated in the right
way, it is absolutely possible for the system to meet the entire information
needs of the marketing decisions makers. With the recent progress in the IT
field, practically any kind of information output / report that is needed for
marketing decisions can be made available by the MIS.
The goals of an ideal MIS are to relieve management from converting data
into information, provide relevant information to each management level for
effective decision-making and the effective conduct of the job function, and
present information that is current and in a readily usable and easily
understood format. To meet these goals the MIS would posses the following
attributes.
MIS would address the primary needs of the management function and not
the needs of a person, the underlying problem, not just the symptoms.
It would present a maximum of information and a minimum of data which
must be reliable and the output would contain sufficient and relevant
information to minimize uncertainly in a format that can be easily understood
and be usable without further modification.
Stages of MIS development:
1. Strategic and projects planning stage.
2. Conceptual system design stage.
3. Detailed system design stage.
4. Implementation, evaluation and maintenance stage.
An effective design is made possible when the user of the information should
be included on the design team. Cost of money and time of the system
should be taken into account, and match them with the benefits derived from
the system. Importance should be given to relevance and selectivity over
sheer quantity. The system should be tested before it is installed. Adequate
training and documentation should be provided for the operations and users
of the system. Information should be disaggregated and similar decisions
should be aggregated. The actual mechanical methods for information
processing are designed and controls for the system developed. The
decisions system must be thoroughly analyzed.
The outputs/reports emanating from the MIS can be classified into the
following four categories:
1. Periodic reports
2.Triggered reports
3.Demand reports
4.Plan reports
• Periodic reports are presented in predetermined formats at specified intervals of
time. They are the normal outputs of any data processing system.
• Triggered reports are reports ion specific situation. By their very nature, the
marketing task and the, marketing decisions require a host of triggered reports
on various situations and subjects. In fact, the competence of the MIS gets tested
by its capacity to give the right triggered reports.
 • Demand reports are the answers provided by the system to specific queries
raised by the marketing decision makers.
• And planned reports are reports tailor made for assisting formulation of sales
forecasts, sales plans, distribution plans, facilities plans and sales budgets.
MIS also develops specialized database on different aspects of marketing
Customer database is one such specialized database. We saw that companies
engaged in direct marketing, especially in catalogue selling and mail order
marketing, rely heavily on customer databases Apart from the basic
information about name, address and other demographic details, data
pertaining to what an individual customer has bought, when the past
purchase was made and other similar details are available in this database.
They also provide the RFM (Recently, Frequency and Monetary) formula,
which, in turn helps the firm arrive at a customer index that shows which
customers are more profitable for the firm. The MIS can take care of the
customer database. —