iBiz: An Android Mobile Application with Business Intelligence for Retail Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs)

Abstract

Currently some Micro and Small sized Enterprises (MSEs) are still recording their sales records, purchases records, and inventory records with pen and paper or the manual method. This may be the reason why MSEs are currently being left behind when it comes to utilizing business intelligence. This inspired the researchers to develop a lightweight mobile application with business intelligence capabilities for MSEs to be able to record their sales, purchases, and inventory in a mobile phone and be able to harness business intelligence with dashboards that will allow them to monitor their sales, purchases and inventory records in more comprehensive ways. After the application was developed using Dart and the Flutter SDK along with the aid of Firebase and Cloudinary as application back-ends, it was tested via functionality and usability testing methods. There were 40 owners of retail micro and small enterprises that were given a structured usability review survey composed of Likert scaled questions to analyze the applicability of the application to MSEs. Analyzing the responses, the researchers were able to determine that the businesses or respondents perceived the developed mobile application as having relevance to their business, with a verbal description of “Excellent” for each functionality in question. The respondents also perceived the application as having satisfactorily presented enough information and functionalities that would be able to help in their business. The results showed that the respondents answered “Strongly Agree” to the importance of the mobile application to their company and they would be willing to use it in the future. Having the prior results and analyses in mind, the researchers conclude that the developed android mobile business intelligence application is viewed applicable for retail micro and small enterprises by its owners as the respondents.