Cardinal Sporting Goods (CSG) is a distributor of sports equipment to small to medium sized retail sporting goods stores. Given below is a narrative of some of the steps in the sales order processing system for CSG. CSGs controller believes that Cardinal can improve the efficiency of the ordering process and asks you to do an analysis of the process. The first step in any such analysis is to create a flowchart that describes the current situation. Unless indicated otherwise, all processes are manual. In your model you may ignore unapproved customer orders and stockouts.

Customer orders are received in the sales department by regular mail or email. Email orders are printed when received and then treated the same as the snail-mail orders. The order is then sent by the sales department to the credit department for credit approval. A clerk in the credit department looks up the customer payment history from the customer file on the computer and marks the customer order approved and returns it to the sales department. A sales clerk then uses a computer to first check the inventory subsidiary ledger file for the availability of the items and then to prepare and print six copies of a sales order. While all six contain the same information, three of the copies are given special titles. Those three are the Picking Ticket, Invoice, and the Shipping Notice. The other three are file copies of the sales order. The picking ticket is sent to the warehouse. The shipping notice and SO file copy 1 are sent to the shipping department. The invoice and SO file copy 2 are sent to billing. SO file copy 3 is filed by the sales order number with the approved customer order in the customer open order file in the sales department. (Flowcharting hint: you may want to put the copies that go to the same place together when you show the stacked multiple copies)

When the shipping department receives the goods and a packing slip from the warehouse, a clerk pulls the shipping notice and SO file copy 1 from a temporary file where they were filed by SO number upon receipt from the sales department. (You do not have to show the goods in your flowchart.) The clerk compares the three documents and the goods. The clerk uses a computer to update the shipping log file and to prepare and print three copies of a bill of lading. The packing slip, the goods, and copies 1 and 2 of the bill of lading are given to UPS. The shipping notice is sent to billing as proof of shipment. Copy 3 of the bill of lading and SO file copy 1 are filed by SO number.

Billing returns SO file copy 2 to the sales department to show that the invoice was sent to the customer. Upon receipt of SO 2, a sales department clerk pulls SO file copy 3 and the approved customer order from the customer open order file and files all three documents in the closed sales file by customer name.