Better Construction Materials

Better Construction Materials (BCM) is an organisation that provides materials to the construction industry. BCM buys its material from a variety of distributors and resells them to its clients in convenient amounts. BCM's ability to deliver goods to the client's premises together with the wide selection of materials it stocks has meant that in the last year the business has grown substantially to the extent that the administration of the business is barely keeping up with the current volume of trade.

In particular, sales and purchasing which is currently operated manually, is under a lot of pressure and client goodwill is low. The high number of business transactions that are handled manually increased the number of data entry errors. Also the lack of updated information is frustrating for BCM and its clients. Clients see BCM staff as inefficient and clients sometimes complain about the time it takes to fulfil sales orders. BCM have lost some clients because of it. Management at BCM has requested its functions be computerized.

Michael Reutens, a systems analyst from the IT consulting firm you work for was asked to analyse and design an appropriate business information system for BCM. After interviews with the appropriate departments the following information was gathered by Michael.

Sales Order Processing

BCM has about 200 clients and information about clients is maintained by staff in the Sales Department. The majority of clients submit orders using their own organisation's purchase order form. Alternatively, they telephone or fax their order to the Sales Department of BCM. BCM's own standard sales order form is created either by copying the order details from the client order form or it is created interactively while the client is on the telephone.

Sales orders are then sent to the Inventory Control and Shipping area, where a shipment note (which contains data copied from the sales order) is produced for the staff to pick the items ordered from inventory. The picked items are placed in a box for shipment, the inventory level is updated, and a shipment label is printed and placed on the box.

At the end of each day an inventory report that shows the inventory level for each material is sent by Inventory staff to the Sales department. As staff occasionally forget to update the inventory level when picked, this results in BCM not having enough inventory to fulfil a sales order as the information in the inventory file is not up to date.

Billing

Details of the sales order are then passed to the Accounting Department for billing three times a week. Standard forms for billing are used and the details from the standard sales order form are transcribed onto the bill by staff in the Accounting Department.

Payments

Client payments are recorded by the Accounts Department staff. If a client does not pay a bill within 14 days of the date on the bill, that bill becomes overdue. A report is generated every night to show the bills that have not been paid within the 14 day period. A reminder notification is created and sent to clients with overdue accounts. If a client has paid but the client's account has not been credited by staff when the report is generated, the client may receive a reminder notification in error.

Purchasing

Purchase order clerks maintain information about the materials that BCM stocks and details about the distributors who supply the material. The clerks also maintain details about purchase orders that are raised to replenish the inventory of materials.

At the end of each day, the inventory control staff sends an inventory report to the Purchasing department. The report shows the inventory level for each stocked material. The purchase order clerks raise purchase orders when the quantity for a material falls below its re-order point.

Assignment Requirements

Unfortunately, Michael has left the organisation and you, as a trainee systems analyst in the IT department, have been asked by your manager to finish the job. By analysing the information gathered from the interviews and using appropriate fact-finding techniques, prepare a Functional Requirements Report

The format for the report is detailed below.

1. Needs and/or Problem description, and proposed solution (system capabilities) of new system.
2. Description of functionality of the new system. You must provide the major (must have) use cases and their descriptions for the new system based on the information provided in the case study. The major (must have) use cases should provide the functionality to address the needs/problems identified in part 1 above.

• You must provide a Use-Case Glossary that shows the name of each use case, a brief description of the use case and the actors for the use case. Look at the assignment example (in the assignment folder on BB) for an example of a brief description of a use case.
• You must number your use cases in the glossary.
• The use cases should be presented in a logical sequence.

3. Description of data requirements of the new system. You must provide:
   1. An ER Diagram
   2. The name, description and an example of the data stored in each of the attributes for each entity and relationship (where applicable). You can make some reasonable assumptions when describing the attributes. You must indicate which attribute is the identifier for each entity.
4. Design input screen(s) for 3 of the major (must have) use cases (identified in part 2 above) that is used to record/update information. Indicate clearly which use case in part 2 that the input screen(s) is for. Provide the use case name, description and actor before the input screen.
   1. Indicate which data entry control is used for each input field and which fields are display only fields.
   2. List the flow of activities i.e. the key steps followed for the dialog with a written description of what the user and system do at each step (see example on BB).
5. Design of the three output reports specified below. You must include example data in your reports.

1. Management requires a monthly report about the overall sales performance of each stocked material item. The report should list the total dollar sales, total quantity of units sold and total profit for each material item and a grand total for dollar sales and profit.
2. The Accounts Department require a report which shows bills that have not been paid within the 14 day period so a reminder notification can be sent to the clients of those bills.

The Accounts Department require a monthly "Aged Debtors" report that provides information about how much debt is owed by each client and how old (i.e. overdue) the debt is. For each client, the report should show the total debt owed to date, how much is owed for the current month, how much is owed for each of the last three months and any amount owed that is more than three months old. The report should include a grand total row