System Proposal for Reengineering Purchase Order Generation and Invoice Processing

The Business

It is the team’s responsibility to analyze the contents of the case for relevant information and develop a system to address the business needs.  The general due dates for the system can be found in the course syllabus; intermediate assignments will be made throughout the course. Proper spelling and good grammar are mandatory in all writing assignments.  For the format of the proposal, see the Sample System Proposal under Course Documents on Blackboard.  Design materials are to be included in the appendix of your proposal in the order they appear in the sample.

Your team has been assigned the task of developing the system to facilitate the reengineering of purchase order generation and invoice processing.  

The Business

Your Company is one of the following:

1.manufacturer: true manufacturer or assembler of parts (with inventory)

2.reseller of goods, services, or information (again, with inventory even if it is digital)

The type of business is inconsequential for your purposes.  You select the type of business based on your own preferences (be creative!).  Various business types of organization and processes including your own are being evaluated for reengineering to streamline the business, better serve your customers, and reduce costs.

Presently, there are 2 people working in Invoice Approval.  In purchasing, there are 4 people generating purchase orders (POs).  POs, on average, cost $75 to generate and require as many as 4 weeks to fill even when material is not backordered.  This is due partially to the slow mail delivery.  Another cause is thought to be a lack of contractual arrangements with vendors for material deliveries.  Slow filling of orders results in production delays and downtime. Backordered material delivery may be difficult to control with any current vendor; if we were able to determine which vendors missed delivery targets and with what frequency, we could work toward a solution or move to another vendor.  We are also unable to take advantage of invoice discount terms for quick payment due to the time required to verify receipt of goods and the transfer of paperwork.  Many of these procedures are manual.

Your Company, Inc., has two production facilities and five sales offices.  The production facilities are located in Evansville, Indiana and Mexico. Three of the Sales Offices are located in St. Louis, MO., Los Angeles, CA., and Baltimore, MD.  The other two offices are located outside the US.  Your task does not involve the offshore sales offices or production site.  Your project will be expanded later by another group and integrated with the international components.

Company Demographics

The Los Angeles sales office staff consists of 2 salespersons and an administrative assistant.  The sales office in St. Louis consists of 3 sales persons and 1 administrative assistant, and Baltimore houses 4 sales persons and 1 administrative assistant.  Production facilities personnel consist of 256 hourly employees, 38 clerical, and 22 salaried employees. 

Current systems are on a mainframe to which the primary interface devices are dumb terminals.  The new system, which you are to develop, will be a Client/Server-based model in order to take advantage of new technologies and begin moving the company toward new computer technologies.  Interfacing with systems on the mainframe is not a consideration for your system at this time.

Another system is being developed concurrently with your system that controls inventory of materials.  Your team must develop an interface to the Inventory System.

Once again, your team has been assigned the task of developing the system to facilitate the reengineering of purchase order generation and invoice processing.  Upper levels of management mandated that the database for these systems will reside on the new client/server system, and backups shall be the responsibility of the database administrator.  The database administrator will interact with your team as a consultant in the database design.

A reengineering project that will impact your systems design is also in process.  Contracts are being negotiated with all approved vendors.  These contracts include agreements on delivery time for ordered material.  This information is used by the purchasing department to develop order points and quantities that will minimize your inventory levels and assure your production department of an adequate supply of raw materials.

A consultant has suggested automatic purchase order generation with a manual interface for special material orders. This consultant has also suggested that invoice payment be made upon receipt of an invoice-not after delivery of the merchandise has been confirmed. Your team, then, has the task of developing the system to facilitate the reengineering of purchase order generation and invoice processing.  

While not an integral part of the system, the new company-wide network that will support your project as well as the Inventory project and currently unknown future projects must be designed.  Demographics for the company have been provided to enable you to determine the network requirements and construction.  Technology is also to be described in terms of software, hardware, and communication technology.  For purposes of the proposal, it is not necessary to address great detail.  You are concerned with gross dollar figures.  Communications may use Windows 2008/2012, Linux, or other appropriate technology.  Programming language/s to be used in the system and why they were chosen should be identified, but the physical design scope of the system will not include programs.

Your team will develop a database to support the application.  Objectives for the database are:

1.Identify and describe data entities about which the new system must store data and document the relationships that exist between those data entities.

2.For each data entity, determine an identifier (one or more attributes) that uniquely identifies one and only one occurrence of that entity.

3.Each data attribute will initially be mapped to one data entity.  Foreign keys will subsequently map to additional entities.

4.An Entity-Relationship diagram (ERD) is required.  This requires that the entities be normalized.  Normalize to 3rd NF.  

A sample of required database documentation can be found in Course Documents of Blackboard.  Go to the Example of System Proposal folder, then open the Sample System Proposal document and scroll down to Database Design (on or near p.17).  

Database development includes normalizing the entities of your ERD.  Each entity should be normalized to 3rd normal form.  Normalization will result in the creation of additional entities.  Such changes should be reflected in the ERD.