Systems Analysis and Design (SAD) Help!

[tRaptor]

Hey, my group needs some help with our Systems Analysis and Design group project:

Project:  This is a special form of  group assignments. In this assignment you shall engage in analyzing and designing an information system of your choice.

The problem we have is we can not come up with a good idea. We have to make a system proposal, feasibility analysis, ect. Anyone have a good idea for a information system?

~Tyler

 

[43st]

How much you want to spend?

 

[JoLLyRoGer]

What is your business case?

Who is it for, small, medium, large company? What is the intended purpose? Is it a entirely new system or are you just updating an existing system..

There's a big difference between an entirely new project vs. a simple change.

 

[vi edit]

Are you familiar with any sort of retail industries?

If so, was the POS (point of sale: AKA: Cash Registers) integrated with the corporate office to automatically keep track of retail sales, employee punches, and inventory?

You could maybe set up a system in say, a group of 20 retail locations that provided up to the minute sales data on retail sales, inventory, and employee management.

 

[cpals]

I have the same class, but we don't have group projects... some single projects that he showed us from previous kids:

1. Inventory database for a company.
2. Package tracking program for the student mail system.
3. Quickbooks style program for a small business.

There were other ones, but I can't remember them...

 

[JoLLyRoGer]

Originally posted by: vi_edit
Are you familiar with any sort of retail industries?

If so, was the POS (point of sale: AKA: Cash Registers) integrated with the corporate office to automatically keep track of retail sales, employee punches, and inventory?

You could maybe set up a system in say, a group of 20 retail locations that provided up to the minute sales data on retail sales, inventory, and employee management.

Depending on how you set up that idea you could also integrate an automated inventory tracking/re-ordering function.

 

[JoLLyRoGer]

Also if you're talking about a sales environment, what about a wireless POS system using PDA's or something creative like that.

eg: Car Dealership: Customer is on the lot looking at cars. Sales rep comes to help. Customer is interested in the price of a used vehicle. Sales rep carries a PDA linked to a central DB that houses the entire vehicle inventory and has all pricing and bottom line figures on hand at a glance. Customer doesn't like the particular model car he's looking at. Wants one with leather seats and in fire-engine red. Sales rep can use the PDA to look it up and see if the dealership has one in stock there or at a sister dealership vs. going back to bother the sales manager EVERY SINGLE TIME to find out what's on the lot while the customer quiety slips away during this waste of time.
Customer wants to do some number crunching. Sales rep can do this with his PDA to give a rough figure payment option. Wireless PDA can log customer contact information to the DB.. and on and on and on...

Etc, Etc.... Use you imagination.

 

[vi edit]

Also if you're talking about a sales environment, what about a wireless POS system using PDA's or something creative like that.

If you were in table service (restaurant) your servers could have a PDA with your POS system loaded on it. The server would take the order, punch it into the PDA, the PDA would wirelessly transmit it to the POS system, which would then in turn print the order off at that appropriate area within the kitchen to be prepared. When the meal was ready, the cook would bump the order, and send a page out to the PDA so the server would know exactly when the meal is ready.

 

[cpals]

Originally posted by: vi_edit

Also if you're talking about a sales environment, what about a wireless POS system using PDA's or something creative like that.

If you were in table service (restaurant) your servers could have a PDA with your POS system loaded on it. The server would take the order, punch it into the PDA, the PDA would wirelessly transmit it to the POS system, which would then in turn print the order off at that appropriate area within the kitchen to be prepared. When the meal was ready, the cook would bump the order, and send a page out to the PDA so the server would know exactly when the meal is ready.

The future of restaurants.

 

[vi edit]

The future of restaurants.

already here

 

[DT4K]

Some of the stuff I've been doing for work:
Quality control system for manufacturing.
Each time a new product is created in production, it has a Material ID that specifies what product it is and a unique batch number for tracking purposes. A record is created for each batch.
QC then does a number of tests for each batch and uses our interface to input the test results for that batch of material.
Each material has a number of required tests and specifications for each test(which are different for each product).
Based on the test results, the program recommends whether the product needs additional testing, is defective and must be trashed, or is validated as good product that can be released for sale.
We track which employee did what tests, restrict permissions to certain users only, and record the employeeID of the person who makes the final decision on release status.
EDIT: We also have a number of screens used to graph trends in test result values so they can troubleshoot the manufacturing process if one of the tests falls out of specification.

Just one of many possible real world systems. This one uses SQL Server for the quality control part, VB6 clients, and interfaces with our corporate inventory system (SAP)

 

[tRaptor]

Thanks everyone for the great ideas. Basically we decided that we are going to keep our grocery store idea and switch it to beeing a inventory tracking / reordering system. Our previous idea of "online ordering" was too close to the book example (we actually didnt even know the book had an example)

So the register systems will tie into the recording system, and possibly automatically reorder the stuff when it gets to a low point, ect.

Also, we have the advantage of no longer having to have inventory done by hand (many man hours) so that wiull save money, less customer complaints due to OOS items, ect.

Any thing else you think we should include would be greatly appreciated.

~Tyler

 

[vi edit]

I'd try and implement a system in the inventory that can track theoretical vs. actual food costs. This would give you some insight on perishable food (cheese, meat, bread products, ect) being wasted before sold, as well as checking to see if what you sold comes close to matching up to what you should have taken in...you can catch theft this way.

Another thought is to build in labor management function - track how many people & at what wages are working at a given time and figure out how much in sales you doing at that time to see if you can justify their labor costs.

You may find that you have twice as many people on hand than needed at certain times of the day, an in other times, not enough people on hand at other times to expidite checkouts. Which is another suggestion - track checkout times and log it. See who your best checkout people are. See who is the worst. Compare how many items they rang up to how long it took them to get the person through.

You may find that cashier a can check out three times as many people as cashier b.

Lots of things you can do.

 

[vi edit]

Another idea is an expidited checkout system. Sams club does this at christmas and it RULES.

This is what they do - many people are waiting in line to check out. There are one or two employees with a hand held scanner with a wireless card in it. These employees walk though the isles and ring up what is in your cart while you wait in line to get to the cashier. They scan your card and your purchase is stored in their system until you get up to the cashier. The cashier scans your card, tells you what you owe. You pay up, and leave. Quick and painless.

Very nice, wait times to checkout are dramatically reduced.

 

[DT4K]

If you do the grocery, you definitely need to include a way to do inventory. Unless this is like a Physics class, where you pretend it's a perfect world without things like food expiration, breakage, and theft to worry about.

Maybe you could assume that you would have an outside company come in and do an inventory once a month. Could be like a black box. They just give you a file or a db and you have something in your system that pulls in the data and reconciles it with what your system says should be the expected inventory.