After graduating from UiTM, you and a group of friends have decided to start a business.
Your first venture is a small trading company selling Product X and you are operating from a rented store in Shah Alam. Your products can either be purchased directly at the store or be delivered to customer upon receiving order via phone call or mail. For phone-order customers, the order form will be filled out by the sales person attending to their phone calls. As for mail-order customers, they can print the order form that can be downloaded from the company website. At present, the website contains only brief information about the company and products.
Interested customers need to call customer service to get details of the products. Online ordering is also not available yet.Required:a) Discuss among your group and choose any products or services for your company. It is advisable to select simple products/services with just a few variants. Create a logo and motto for your company and do not forget to name your company.Systems Planning – Preliminary InvestigationYour business runs well for the first few months.
You are able to manage the business using spreadsheets and word processing but as your company’s good reputation begin to blossom your sales team start experiencing difficulty in keeping up with endless phone calls about the types of product are available, specifications of the products, special discounted items, and so on. You realize that it is time for your company to have a proper order processing system but you are unsure where to start. The next sales peak period would be in July so any new system should be in place before that.One morning, you meet with En.
Rashdan, the IT manager and convey the idea of having the new system. En. Rashdan says “I will do my best to help you but why don’t you put all your ideas and requirements into system request? Then it will become official and we can start something from there.” So, you spend the rest of the afternoon drafting the document. Required:b) Prepare a draft of system request for the proposed ordering system. Think about the benefits of having that system.
You may name sales department as the project sponsor but you need to emphasize more on the functionality of the proposed system. State at least one constraint in the request.c) Who should evaluate system request? Discuss how a system request is evaluated.After getting the nod, you immediately call En. Rashdan and assign him to conduct preliminary investigation.
After performing interviews and observing a number of key staff, En. Rashdan highlights the following concerns:• Customer services were accused of being inefficient for keeping the customers waiting too long on the phone to get information on certain products. One of the key reasons for the delay is customer service needs to flip through the catalogue to find product information.• There are complaints that products being shipped to the wrong customer address even though the company is using reliable courier service.
• Hot selling items sometimes run out of stock and takes time to replenish resulting in loss of sales. Random check with suppliers dismissed any suggestion of insufficient supplies.• It is difficult to retain customers’ loyalty since sales department could not properly identify their regular customers who deserve certain amount of discounts.• Sales person sometimes wrongly calculate the total sales amount as they have to do it manually and in some cases provides wrong quotation to customers. Sales amount understatement will result in loss to company while overcharging a customer will result in complaints and lead to bad company reputation.
You have learned that besides deciding on the scope of the system during preliminary investigation, you need to determine the true nature of the business problem rather than dealing with the symptoms of these problems. Required:d) For each of the concerns listed above, determine whether it is a business problem or a symptom. Discuss what could be the real problem if you find it to be the latter.e) Develop project goals for each of the problem identified.
f) Compare the project goals with the systems request. Use the project goals to determine which part of the request goes beyond the scope of your project.
