System Design For Business Report: Requirements And Scalability

The List of Questions

Discuss about the System Design for Business Report.

The report aims to prepare a business report for presenting the system analysis that has been done on the system and then finally present the system design that will serve as the basis for the construction of the business and the act as an example for the future processes. For the sake of preparation of the report, requirement analysis has been done by taking valuable decisions and viewpoints from various groups. Later the requirements of the system were realized and finally scalability was discussed citing its importance to a franchise.

The requirement analysis has been done by consulting various people groups which will help in understanding the problem encountered and the timeline that will be needed for implementation of the project.

1. What do you think about running a chain of restaurants?
2. What are the factors important for running a chain?
3. What are the factors that affect the business of an outlet?
4. What do you think about the computers in management of the chain?
5. What is the importance of signature dishes for a chain?
6. What are the importance staffs in an organization?
7. Is marketing necessary for running a restaurant?
8. How is the capital important for a restaurant?
9. What is the impact of location on the business of restaurant?
10. How to impress customer?
11. How to lure customer to restaurant?
12. What values should be incorporated to make the restaurant match the world class level?

The group has a chain of seven restaurants and serves a variety of dishes that are well loved by the customers. The group is against the just creation of chains that serves the same dishes across all the restaurants. According to the group each restaurant of the chain should have a different take based on the locality which will in turn help in the creation of value across all the entities, thus creating a child which has its base in parents but different according to its experience. The group has also laid emphasis on community, staffing, and communication. It has also been suggested that services should take the front seat rather than the money.

This section includes the responses from a group of customers. This group has laid emphasis on five aspects. The first aspect is customer convenience, i.e. the restaurants should be well placed for the ease of access. Customer services, to ensure the visitors are well served and feel at home. Food Quality, for satisfying the taste buds of the customers. Bookkeeping, to ensure all the data regarding the transactions are well maintained. Finally suggestion by the group was going for the niche that helps in the creation of a newer customer base, and the expansion will have more credibility.

This group consists of the members of the kitchen. According to the group, the chef is the most important part of a restaurant and hence choosing one for the restaurant should be the prime consideration. The group also suggested that the capital estimation should be exaggerated for redundancy. Finally, evolution should be given due importance as the chains who failed to evolve had perished with time.

Feedback from Group 1

The fourth group consists of managers who have served various hotels and restaurants. The group has laid emphasis upon, hard work which will help in creating a good name for the chain. Money should also be given more importance and management, bookkeeping and a proper hierarchy should be maintained to ensure a smooth functioning of the system. The management of the company should be clear to the staffs about the goal of the organization and advertisement through suitable media should be done to reach the potential consumers.

The final group is a combination of restaurant owners and the manager. The group has specifically mentioned that the papers of the restaurant should be according to the law of the land. The licensing should be given utmost importance and helps to avoid various actions that could be taken to harass the management. Following which management of staff, inventory, and other services were mentioned.

The discussion from the group has presented many aspects upon which proper emphasis should be laid to succeed in the business of ‘Restaurant’ and further expanding the entity through the chain. The main objective of this project is to analyze the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) related to management of the restaurant chain. The requirements that have been realized during the process of requirement analysis are:

1. Each outlet of the chain should be treated as a separate entity; hence each restaurant should have a separate system that is connected to the main office (Ward and Peppard 2016).
2. A roster system to record the data about the staff of the specific restaurant. This will not only help in keeping track of the staff but will also ensure better manageability of the staff and the resources.
3. Inventory management system so that the requirement of each restaurant can be monitored centrally (Aggarwal and Mohanty 2015). Since all the outlets of the chain will be in the same vicinity, the resources can be shared which will save a lot of energy and resource.
4. Bookkeeping software for management of monetary resources.
5. Advertisement mechanism which could be through social media which will help in targeting the customers with specific tastes (Schwartz et al. 2013).

Scalability could be understood as the characteristic of the system to cope up with the increased pressure which could be increased load or expansion of the present system (Efentakis et al. 2013). In the context of ICT, scalability of a system has two aspects, firstly the system i.e. the hardware and the software continue to work at the same rate even when the volume of data increases at the present system. The other situation deals with the expansion of the system, i.e. the smaller system could be made larger by increasing the peripherals connected to the system (Borghoff and Pareschi2013). The aim of this project is to suggest a system design that will ensure scalability in both the fields, i.e. the systems will be made strong enough to deal with any amount of data and the peripherals will be made strong enough to support the expansion of the system.

The Mexican food outlet that is supposed to be opened on Sunshine Coast aims to work under a franchise arrangement for the other future stores. Hence the business will expand, and the resources that are associated with the business need to expand too. As per the requirement of investor, each outlet should be interconnected to ease the ordering and inventory management. The outlets should have wireless access points to ensure internet connectivity be provided to the customers. The project will start with a single outlet on the beach which will act as the base for all the other outlets. Hence the system should be designed in such a way that any amount of expansion doesn’t affect the system that has been installed at this point. Hence the scalability becomes a pivotal factor for implementation of the franchise (Mishra 2015).

Feedback From Group 2

As the business grows from a single outlet to multiple outlets, the main objective of meeting the demands of the consumers remains constant, but the load subsequently increases. Since the market demands are variable, and the taste of the consumer changes with time and according to the availability of resources, the service provider should always be a step ahead to meet the demands. The scalability becomes important as it gives the computation power needed for the expanding businesses. The expanding business provides more consumer and with it comes more data that has to be sorted out in due time to offer better services (DaSilva et al. 2013). Also, the internet service to consumers will feel the brunt is lesser capability is installed, and more customers turn up at the same time. Hence redundancy of the resources should be given the due importance. Apart from the internet services, the order placement and inventory management will also become complex with the increasing amount of outlets, for the management of the same, computers with interconnection have to be provided to reduce the complexity of managing the resources. For interconnection switches or hubs should be installed that is capable of accommodating all the systems that are installed in the network. So it can be understood that the scalability should be kept in mind for an expanding the system (Wang et al. 2014). But it should also be borne in mind that scalability should be based on real assumption as installing more resources than the required quantity will result in resource wastage.

 Hence it can be seen that franchise has a specific requirement, it is created to grow into a system that is spread over an area. Since the requirement of the system is always unknown and the growth is unpredictable, some redundancy is always helpful, and scalability offers that extra mile to the organization that helps in better management of the system (JabÅ‚onski 2016).

Conclusion

 In the report, the various aspects of the restaurant management system and its implementation have been analyzed and presented in three sections. The system has been designed in such a way to serve as a model for the other chain of the franchise that is yet to be implemented. In the first section, the requirement analysis has been done with the help of five groups; the requirements were then analyzed and presented with reasons for implementation. In the following section, personal views regarding the requirements have been presented. Finally, in the last section, scalability has been deliberated in detail which is an important factor for the expansion of the business and accommodating extra load on the present system, hence the completing the project layout in all the aspects.

References

Aggarwal, V. and Mohanty, P., 2015. Smart systems and smart grids for effective governance of electricity supply in India. In E-Governance for Smart Cities (pp. 159-175).Springer Singapore.

Borghoff, U.M. and Pareschi, R. eds., 2013. Information technology for knowledge management.Springer Science & Business Media.

DaSilva, C.M., Trkman, P., Desouza, K. and Lindič, J., 2013. Disruptive technologies: a business model perspective on cloud computing. Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 25(10), pp.1161-1173.

Efentakis, A., Brakatsoulas, S., Grivas, N., Lamprianidis, G., Patroumpas, K. and Pfoser, D., 2013, November. Towards a flexible and scalable fleet management service.In Proceedings of the Sixth ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Computational Transportation Science (p. 79).ACM.

JabÅ‚oÅ„ski, A., 2016. Scalability of Sustainable Business Models in Hybrid Organizations. Sustainability, 8(3), p.194.

Mishra, C., 2015. Why and When Firms Franchise. Available at SSRN.

Schwartz, H.A., Eichstaedt, J.C., Kern, M.L., Dziurzynski, L., Ramones, S.M., Agrawal, M., Shah, A., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., Seligman, M.E. and Ungar, L.H., 2013. Personality, gender, and age in the language of social media: The open-vocabulary approach. PloS one, 8(9), p.e73791.

Wang, C., Liu, X., Song, Y. and Han, J., 2014.Scalable and robust construction of topical hierarchies. arXiv preprint arXiv:1403.3460.

Ward, J. and Peppard, J., 2016. The Strategic Management of Information Systems: Building a Digital Strategy. John Wiley & Sons.