Background

Maggie's Furniture Inc. is a small manufacturing company built from the ground up over the last 12 years by Margaret, the Founder and CEO. She has faced and survived many crises over the years, and now the company seems to have established a good reputation in the market and is growing well. Margaret is well respected by her peers in the industry, where she is known as a no-nonsense person who knows how to run a manufacturing business, hands-on.

However, with the continued growth of the company, Margaret has recognized that she needs some assistance, and has employed Jim, an experienced accountant who has worked with several manufacturing firms in the past. She has made him the Chief Operating Officer.

Other key employees at Maggie's Furniture Inc. include:

• Alan: Runs the manufacturing plant. Likes to have lots of stock on hand so that his plant never stops. Does not believe in modern manufacturing techniques like just-in-time or lean manufacturing. Manages his schedule on a whiteboard in his office.
• Michael: Responsible for placing purchase orders to replenish the manufacturing stock (as well as for other company items). Purchase orders are paper based. Values his excellent relationships with the company's suppliers and trusts them to invoice correctly, so does not always price the orders. With some suppliers, where he has long-term relationships, the terms of sale have been agreed over a handshake and are not written down.
• Maria: Receives stock when it arrives, checks it against a copy of the purchase order and records the incoming quantity manually against an inventory ledger (book), which is also used for issuing stock to the plant. She doesn't record the deliveries in the ledger every day, and is often teased about the pile of delivery receipts in her in-tray.
• Helen: Has been a bookkeeper all her life. An old friend of Margaret, and has been with the company since inception. Can be very abrupt and is feared by everyone in the company. She manages all the accounting functions with an iron fist, and no-one dares argue with her. Margaret notes that Helen has never made a mistake and enjoys stating that there are only three certainties in life - death, taxes and Helen's books. Helen currently uses QuickBooks for recording everything in the accounting department, but has not integrated anything outside of accounting and uses QuickBooks only as a simple bookkeeping system.
• Jeanine: Helen's niece, employed straight out of school by Helen as a junior clerk. Her job each month is to reconcile incoming supplier invoices against the paper copies of the purchase orders and Maria's ledger. She then presents the reconciliation to Helen for checking, after which Jeanine enters the amounts into QuickBooks to generate supplier cheques, which she mails to them.

The Scenario

You are the leader of a team of software developers, called Innovation Excellence Inc. You specialize in designing, developing and implementing custom solutions for small manufacturers. Although there are many packaged, ERP, solutions for manufacturers, these can be too expensive for small companies to implement and licence, and often require the company to change its processes more than it would like. In fact, Jim had planned to implement an ERP at Maggie's Furniture but there was so much resistance to the change that Maggie instructed Jim to find a different solution.

After the failure of the previous consulting team to overcome the resistance to change at Maggie's Furniture, and Maggie's instruction to find another solution, Jim calls you (he worked with you three years ago at another firm) and asks your team to build a custom solution. As before, Jim wishes to begin with accounting, as the systems are semi-manual and, he thinks, outdated. To achieve some of his company-wide efficiency objectives he needs accounting to be efficient, providing the information he needs on demand. After some discussion with Jim, the two of you decide to design, build and implement a Purchase-To-Pay system. P2P functions include:

• Generation and placement of purchase orders. Most of these are for raw materials being used in the manufacturing plant. Currently the plant production schedule is managed manually, and Michael will need to enter the purchase orders directly into the system you create. Jim has a future vision that the next development phase will include a system for managing the production schedule and the bill of materials, integrated into the purchasing system you are developing now.
• Capture of deliveries, recording materials/supplies received against the purchase orders. These will mostly be received at the plant, for production, but can also include office and other supplies.
• Payment of invoices. This is to be completely automated, based on: terms agreed with the suppliers, the price on the purchase orders, and the quantity received. Invoices are not needed. This will require:
  • The agreed supplier payment terms to be stored in the system.
  • The supplier banking details to be stored in the system so that payments can be directly deposited.
  • The purchase orders to be accurately priced.
  • The quantity and date received to be up-to-date and recorded accurately.
• Adjustments: although expected to be rare, occasionally there may be a pricing change, or mistake, or an agreement to reduce the quantity received (say because of poor quality), or a discount, etc, which will require an option for accounting to make adjustments in the system.

The Task

• Create user stories for the system you have been requested to develop.
• Make sure that you take into account every function in the Purchase to Pay process that might be needed by the organization.
• Note that some of the functions will be automated and may not have user interfaces - these must be included (the "user" will be the system or a department function).
• Considereveryperson in the scenario and what they might want and need from the system.
• Consider also stakeholders outside of the scenario, such as suppliers.
• Prioritize each user story using the MoSCoW model.
• Group the user stories into Epics, along with a brief description of each Epic and your logic for separating it as an Epic. You may choose to start with the creation of Epics, then create user stories within them.