Your aim (over the three assignments) is to analyze the business operations of an enterprise, identify the information needs of actors, and design and implement a centralized database to enable the organizations operations. You may want to consider all assignments together as a single project involving the principles of information analysis, database design and implementation, and execution. You may find it useful to browse through all requirements before you begin work on the individual assignments, so you can appreciate the expectations more clearly. You are welcome (in fact, strongly encouraged) to contact your instructor with any questions regarding the requirements well in advance of the due dates, especially if you believe that the requirements are unclear to you or you need additional information. Please read the description of the business case and the specific requirements for the three assignments on the following pages.

CASE DESCRIPTION Consider a real-world organization such as Kroger, Speedway, Dollar General, Kohls, Shell, Barnes & Noble, Drug Mart, Walgreens, Best Buy, Office Depot, and Dollar Tree that deals with goods and services and operates chains of stores in many regions. Each store has several employees in different roles such as associate, supervisor, and manager and work different shifts. Each store has different departments and each department carries different lines of products (e.g., apparel, snacks, phones, cookware, jewelry) sold by different units of measure (e.g., pieces, pounds). The products may be subject to different levels of sales tax including no sales tax as imposed by the local governments in the regions in which the stores are located. The stores cater to individual consumers as well as corporate customers. The organization necessarily maintains information about corporate customers since they may be billed periodically or later for their purchases. Information about individual consumers may or may not be gathered depending on whether they opt to sign up for loyalty programs. Customers may complete many sales transactions at any of the stores and each sales transaction may contain any number of items. The organization periodically replenishes the inventory at its many stores. The decision to replenish is based on predefined reorder levels and the purchase orders are placed directly with different suppliers. Each purchase order may be used to order multiple types of products. Each supplier generally supplies a predefined set of products.

SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS FOR ASSIGNMENT #1 Answer the following questions based on the case description. Provide as much information as possible for an accurate evaluation by the instructor. Your deliverable should include responses on all topics in the questions below. If your ER model does not contain a specific topic (e.g., superclass entity) due to choice, you can illustrate it using an example that you considered for or may apply to the model.

1. Identify the organization you have chosen for the project. Describe its operations including products, services, regions, etc.

2. State all assumptions you made for the project, including and beyond those stated in the case description.

3. Identify the entities necessary to enable organizational operations. Describe the purpose and scope of each entity.

4. Refer to the entities in (3). Which are strong and weak entities? Which are superclass and subclass entities? Justify your choices.

5. Identify the relationships between entities. Develop a table that shows possible relationships between entities consistent with the needs of the organization.

6. Specify the cardinality constraints (maximum, minimum) for each relationship. Justify your choices consistent with the assumptions in (2).

7. Refer to the relationships in (5). Which are the recursive and ternary relationships? What are the associative entities? Justify your choices.

8. Identify the critical attributes necessary for each entity and associative entity. Be sure to include composite, multivalued, derived, and optional attributes.

9. Identify candidate unique attributes for each entity and associative entity. Be sure to identify the unique attributes for the same. Provide reasons for your choice.

10. Construct a single ER model based on (3) and (5). The ER diagram should be created using a software tool such as Visio.

11. Describe the advantages and limitations of your ER model. Reflect on the extent to which your ER model is consistent with business requirements.