The Business Scenario Problem Description

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

BUSINESS SCENARIO AND WORK NARRATIVE OVERVIEW

COMPANY MANAGEMENT SUMMARY

Agave Dry cleaners (ADC) is a very well acclaimed dry cleaning service which offers their customers well serviced laundry and home delivery. They are operating successfully with the hope of expansion, they are abiding to their clear mission statement which is:

To provide outstanding customer service by being cheerful, passionate, timely, friendly and efficient

To give best attention to every detail required to surpass customer expectation

To be an awarder of customer’s choice and excellent performance

To create international awareness for their services

This scenario explores and identifies the most reliable requirements for ADC database design structure, the most suitable working environment for it to exist and a well deployable structure for it to operate. ADC’s customers:

Pay for services and be assured that their credentials are well managed by authorized users

Assured that there will not be a mix up of packages up for delivery due to irregularities of personal contacts

Be ensured of timely delivery of services

ADC’s employees:

Manage company information seamlessly

Be provided with consistent data across all regions enabling ease of performing tasks

Be able to add, delete and update company records

And as a whole ADC, will:

Have up-to date company records across branches in each region

Prevent the possibilities of malicious acts (fraud) as data should be secured

Have better management of employees

Have well managed customer and employee information

Be able to support the achievement of the company’s objectives

BUSINESS SCENARIO PROBLEM DESCRIPTION

Most companies strategically increase their customer baseline by providing improved, convenient and timely services. With these, they would be able to stand above their various contenders in the same industry. ADC’s vision is "to provide world class fabric-care to their esteemed customers at competitive prices" and serving over 150 in one of their branches shows prospect in them having an upsurge the numbers of customers they would have which will be exceeding 700 as total in all their branches. Having this glitch of business records being stored on a spreadsheet based system, has accounted for how difficult the company finds it to round-up annual reports due to inconsistent data which are not centrally located.

WORK NARRATIVE OVERVIEW

The current operational processes of Agave Dry Cleaners are carried out manually. By this, when a customer wants place an order by drop garment for dry cleaning, a procedural sheet would be handed out to for the customer to fill. Once completed by the customer, the clerical staff inputs the information into the Excel spreadsheets. The idea that the data which the customer is being asked to fill on a paper-based form will be transferred by a staff into the spreadsheet could only result into inconsistent data as several mistakes could be made while entering records. The company’s performance and process timeliness is reduced as the course of action is continuously repeated whenever a customer places an order thereby creating multiple records of the same customer on the spreadsheets. Another challenging aspect ADC encounters is the proper synchronization of employees that are assigned to carry out customer orders. Increasingly, the company’s management have received complaints as to how mix-up are being made in their deliveries which is as a result of the employees being issued incorrect invoices having possibilities of customers name being matched up with a wrong address. Also it was identified that there were replications of customer records. Internally, management found it difficult in gathering information from the various service departments in the company as it lacked centralized source storage.

DETAILED OBJECTIVES

Availability of a centralized storage of customers, employee, order details and inventory records for management so that an alteration in the data of one department will reflect in the other department.

Ensure management and maintenance of records can be easily accessible at the same time to all employees

Provide a system that is well secured to prevent entry of malicious data

Provide management records that would be up-to date

Support data integrity by preventing erroneous inputs by employees

VIEWS OF ENVIRONMENT AND PROCESSES

The process flow in taking customers’ orders is the same irrespective of the customer already existing or not. A new customer that would like to be serviced by any Agave Dry Cleaners branch would be provided with the necessary form to fill in their personal information. This will later be processed by the attending employee before taking the customer’s order. Agave Dry Cleaners services many customers and an employee is assigned to attend to many customers. When customers want to place orders, the attending staff enters the type and amount of garments owned by the customer. The attending staff then assigns the employee that would carry out the customers’ orders. The finance department then sums up the total amount of the orders which will be issued to the customer. Every customer who places orders is issued a copy of the invoice. Orders can be picked up by a customer or delivered by ADC’s staff. If a customer wants his order to be delivered, an extra charge would have been paid when the order was being made and printed out along side with the invoice. An employee monitors the inventory level and the overall working actions of the remaining employees.

ACTORS AND THEIR ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

COMPUTER ACTORS AND ROLES

The table below lists the computer actors and their respective roles.

COMPUTER ACTORS

ROLES

Spreadsheet Application

Store the employee, orders, inventory records and all other vital information

Computer System

Provides access to the spreadsheet application

HUMAN ACTORS AND ROLES

The table below shows a list of the human actors and their roles.

HUMAN ACTOR

ROLES

Human Resource (HR)

Responsible for monitoring the working actions of employees and keeping track of the inventory.

Finance

Responsible for the payment of orders made by customers

Employees

Carry out the business processes and processing of customer orders

REQUIREMENTS

The requirements for the proposed database management design are:

Ease of use and management (user friendly)

Keep track of the inventory stock level

Security against unauthorized access or modification

Provide privacy for customers by restricting access to their personal payment information.