Furniture Mart Intelligence System
Introduction
It is without a doubt that the use of technology and other software in businesses have automated most of the tiresome processes. In return, companies have been able to reap higher profits over time. Technology is now applicable in almost every aspect of business whether manufacturing, the offering of services or even implementation of business plans. All that the technology that is being introduced is gearing to is to provide data in an analyzed way for quick and appropriate decision making. The faster management is able to make a decision on a certain business course of action, the quicker it is to serve the clients and satisfy them. It may also be in a scenario of an impending calamity that needs quick decision to avert it. With human processing, analyzing these data may require a substantial amount of time. On the other hand, having management software in place facilitates quicker decision making since it would have done much of the analysis or even provided recommendations on possible courses of action for the manager to consider.
This paper, therefore, seeks to present an in-depth analysis of a proposed Furniture Mart Ltd Intelligence System. It shall consider among others, its system requirements, and design specification, as well as a critical look at some samples of expected managerial decision-making assistance that the system will facilitate.
- Solution Outline
After a critical analysis of Furniture Mart Ltd, we came up with a number of observations that already exist. To begin with, there is an existing system that enables clients to make purchases from the store. This system is essential and very effective since it has eliminated the lengthy paperwork processing procedures that most companies would use in selling their products. The system enables real-time purchases and offers the clients an opportunity to make purchases at any time of the day and have their goods delivered to their premises. Don't use plagiarised sources.Get your custom essay just from $11/page
The other existing system is one that enables suppliers to provide furniture to the store. The system is able to keep track of all transactions that each of the suppliers are involved in with respect to the company and therefore able to provide suppliers’ analysis data for decision making when required. Now that the company has the two most crucial parties of its success covered with appropriate software, there only lacks a system that will help manage these services. This is where the Management Support System finds its market niche.
The proposed Management Support System will be known as the Furniture Mart Intelligence System (FMIS). Its main purpose is to offer managerial support to both clients and suppliers. For it to achieve this, it has to have access to both the client ordering software as well as the supplier’s system. Since it is bridging the two systems that are already in operation in offering services to Furniture Mart Ltd clients and suppliers, it will be able to analyze data transacted between these two systems (Grierson, 2011). By doing so, it will form a strong analytical foundation on which the managers of Furniture Mart will base in making their decisions regarding the store.
For the system to achieve its purpose, it shall have two distinct main components; an application and the database. The database will cater for data storage while the application will analyze this data. The application will further consist of two parts. A front end or the user interface and a backend that will be responsible for communicating with the database. The combination of all these subcomponents is what constitutes the FMIS. To have a look at the data that resides in the database, a workbook containing 7 spreadsheets has been extracted and attached to this report. An ERD diagram has also been provided to show the different fields that are holding the data in the database.
The aim of this project is to offer the best means for acquiring and making a decision on “Who are the best regular customers”. With this in mind, the objective is to determine and convert several random customers into loyal and regular customers for purposes of ensured business. Furniture Mart Intelligence System database provides the data needed to be analyzed to come up with these random clients. Knowing the best customers for the store is beneficial. Their feedback will help to improve the system and management can utilize this information to target the random customers. Ways of luring them into transacting more with the store will include offering them personalized promotions, discounts among other lucrative offers to convert them into regular customers.
SWOT Analysis
SWOT is the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats within an organization. Strengths and weaknesses focus on internal operations whereas opportunities and threats focus on external factors. The existing positive attributes to the company are that there is fairly strong management as the decision was made to convert the “these casual customers into regular customers by means of targeted offers”. Also, certain business processes are successful like the FOTS database transaction system to create PO’s and send them to supplies when there’s limited stock. We also have a range of assets like our current customer base, revenue and competent staff as well as physical assets like the stores we currently own, equipment, technology and so on. Furthermore, we have a range of competitive advantages like resources to extend the use of information technology in support of management decision-making. FOTS POTS system which many companies may not have.
Weaknesses are the casual customers that do not fully commit to turning into regular customers hence we have developed a strategy to target them via promotional offers. It will be useful to investigate the competitors on the market and learn from their strengths and weaknesses.
Opportunities could be to extend our brand visibility and determine the target audience. Convince them why our product is better than the competitors, perhaps via marketing and offers and get a good reputation for the company. A key piece of that marketing plan will be the store’s grand opening, and the promotional strategies involved. Establishing the company could promote the brand and bring in more customers. It’s also important to stay on top of trends in the market making it easier to encourage customers to buy new products. It could be additional processes and measures the company could implement to have a competitive advantage such as implementing a chat system for new customers visiting the website, a 24/7 phone line (Toll-free calls preferable), A returns policy among others. Many companies already have these features and its essential to incorporate them.
Threats are external factors that you have no control over so a contingency plan needs to be made if they do occur. For example, if items arrive damaged or defected in some way, there is a high volume of items returned back to the company, the competition offering better prices or higher discounts or better quality products, new competitors to the market, a supplier pulling out or marking p their prices significantly and maybe market trends that could become a threat. To avert these possible calamities, it is essential that the items to be supplied in the store come from certified suppliers who have proven customer satisfaction in the provision of quality products to the store. This will reduce purchases returns to the store and will go a long way in enhancing customer confidence in the items the store offers.
- Management Information
As shown in the ERD diagram, there are 7 major parties in the Furniture Mart Intelligence System. These include the staff, suppliers, products, items, orders, customers, and product groups. Each of these is related since they are either being supplied by one party and being acquired by another and all are under the watch of the staff. There are those that increase during system operations while others decrease. For instance, an order will reduce the number of items available for a certain commodity and it will be linked to several of the parties in the system such as supplier, customer, product group and the customer who in this case would have acquired product.
Data Dictionary
The staff table contains staff-id, last-name, first-name, job-title, reports-to fields with the staff_id field being the primary key. The Foreign Key in this table is the reports-to field which points to the manager that the staff is answerable to.
The suppliers’ table contains supplier-id, supplier-company, supplier-address, supplier-contact-name, staff-liaison with the supplier-id being the primary key. Staff-liaison is the foreign key in this table which points to the staff that is consulting for this supplier. A supplier is attached to a staff who is their consultant (Kali et al., 2009). It is effective means of managing suppliers since each of them is guaranteed support and service through their consultants for the store.
The customers’ table contains customer-id, last-name, first-name, title, status, company-name, address, tel-no fields with the customer-id being the primary key. The table is a list of customers who have purchased items from the store. This will form the basis of our analysis since customers are the ones we look forward to analyzing in detail. Determination of random customers, the frequency with which they buy from the store and coming up with lucrative offers for them to be more attracted to transact with the store depends on this data.
The products’ table contains product-id, product-description, product-finish, product-group, product-price, number-in-stock, reorder-level fields with the product-id being the primary key. The product group is the foreign key in this table. It relates to the products’ table and the product group’s table.
The products group table contains group-id, group-name, supplier-id fields with the group-id being the primary key. The foreign key is the supplier-id which links the product group to its respective supplier in the store.
The items table has order-id, product-id, number-ordered fields with order-id as the primary key. The foreign key is the product-id that links the item to its product group. The relationship can also be traced back to the supplier for the specific items ordered.
The order table has order-id, customer-id, staff-id, order-date with the order-id as the primary key. There are two foreign keys in this table; customer-id that links the orders to their respective customers and the staff-id that links the order and the staff that served the customer that sold the item.
One other important note to make is that managers will be able to make decisions based on the results that they get from the FMIS system. Additional information that will be available is; the location of the suppliers, the best-selling products and the best serving staff. It will also provide the best consulting staff for purposes of analysis or even engaging them to find out what marketing strategies they are using to win the numerous customers they are serving.
- Design Specification
2.1 Technical Design
There is so much to consider before embarking on the development of the FMIS system. To begin with, we shall analyze Furniture Ordering Transaction System and the Purchases Ordering Transaction System. This will help understand the system requirements of these two systems and therefore be able to derive system requirements for FMIS. A detailed description of its flow and use cases forms part of its technical design (Zhou et al., 2009).
The Products Ordering Transaction System is basically an application that enables the store to acquire the various products that it is offering for sale to its customers from the suppliers. The store uses this to get a set of products and groups them before offering them for sale in the store. Each of the items that are available for sale in the store is supplied by a specific supplier who has a consulting staff working for the store. This way it is easy to know who to contact when the supply of a certain commodity is required or when the re-order level for a specific product has been attained. It also enables the collection of data on the specifics of items that are best selling and from which supplier. It simply enables the store to rank its suppliers.
The Furniture Ordering Transaction System is another existing and useful system in the store. It simply enables customers to know which products are available for sale in the store and gives the customers an interface for them to make purchases from the store. It is the source of the items, orders and customers data. This is the main area that the application is deriving its data.
The data is processed using queries that are derived from the database tables to result in a given set of data that the managers can use in making decisions. For instance, in determining the best regular customers, a number of tables are queried. First, we obtain the customer with the highest purchases from the order table and return their customer-id. This customer-id is then used to check the details of the customers from the customers’ table. We can get more information on who serves the customer and the sort of products that the customer buys as well as fetching the supplier for the products sold to this regular customer (Tarique et al., 2014). This is data that sits in different tables in the database but with the use of Primary and Foreign keys, it is possible to fetch it and present it in a meaningful manner to the managers for use.
- Software Implementation Environment
FMIS will be an ASP.NET web application. This is because there is a need to have it accessible from anywhere. It makes it easier for managers to access it for use since the managerial staff are usually moving about trying to close deals for the company as well as looking for new ventures the company may be interested in, for this reason, making the application available on the go is crucial.
It was evident the provided CSV files had some data errors and inconsistencies. These existed in supplier and customer addresses. Some of the addresses were blank while others contain question marks saved as addresses for the clients. However, these errors did not hinder the development and achievement of the project’s objective. This is because the queries that led to the achievement of the required results did not require to be built around these inconsistent data.
To get the required results, the queries were run based on the primary keys and foreign keys contained in the various data tables in the system’s database. The FMIS database contains 7 tables. The application is developed in ASP.NET using visual studio 2019 as the development IDE and runs an MS SQL database running on MS SQL Server 14 as the Database Management System. To run the application, it can be hosted in IIS or run directly from the development environment or even hosted to a domain and accessed remotely. There are other applications that can also be used to expose the application remotely such as ngrok which is basically an application that uses tunneling to expose your localhost environment for remote access in both secure and non-secure HTTP access.
Running the Application
The following is a description om how to set up the application and run it in the development environment. This is however for demonstration purposes. On production, the application will be hosted in azure. To begin with, Visual Studio 2019 and MS SQL Server 2014 are needed. First, download and install Visual Studio 2019, customization of the installation is necessary to reduce the installation time as well as the disk requirement. Make sure to choose asp web applications. Installation disk space for this is about 1.88gb.
Download and install MS SQL Server 2014 (preferably 64 bit) and create a default instance of MS SERVER in local disk. Once these installations are complete, obtain the FMIS database files and unzip them. Open SQL Server Management Studio. Create a server named “(local)”. Right-click on Databases and select “Attach”, browse to the unzipped database files and select fmis.mdf and click open. The file will be loaded together with its log file. Click “OK” to complete attaching the database (Zeng, Li & Ding, 2013). Following the above procedure leads to the successful addition of the FMIS database into the SQL Server Instance created in the installation process.
The next step is to unzip the FMIS application to a working space. Double click FMIS.Sln file or right-click it and choose open with and select Visual Studio 2019 as the application to open the file with. Once open, make a few setups such as the browser you wish to use in accessing the application (Google Chrome recommended) and run the application. The application will run and open in the Chrome browser.
- Test Plan and Results
To ascertain that the application has achieved its intended purpose. It shall be subjected to testing where the following managerial decisions will be the key guidelines to check the system’s conformity to its objectives. Some of these managerial decisions include:
- Who are the most effective consultants (consider how many)?
- Who are the most effective order staff (consider how many)?
- Which suppliers do we use most (consider how many)?
- Which are the most popular products (consider how many)?
- Which are the most popular product categories (consider how many)?
- Who are the best regular customers (consider how to evaluate “best”)?
- Who are the best private clients (consider how to evaluate “best”)?
- Which are the best geographic areas for business from the client?
A test run was conducted using the developed system and the obtained result screenshots taken. To begin with, data retrieval from the database to the interface was tested and ascertained that the application is using data provided in the initial CSV files provided before commencing on developing the system. It is, however, important to note that the system has been developed to be simple and easy for the managers to use. All that is required for them to do is to choose what information they wish to access and data will be retrieved using predesigned and coded SQL queries.
- Group Critique
As a team, we agreed on the use of ASP.NET because it is the most common development environment among our team members. There are also other aspects that led to this choice stands out as the best one. To begin is its large support base. This is provided by the many developers who post and give professional solutions to the most intriguing programming implementations that the team may be interested in implementing (Piątkowska & Plechawska2018). However, a consensus will have to be undertaken to agree on how project development will be subdivided amongst the developers and how the integration of the individual project tasks into one seamless FMIS system.
System development was realized by dividing the development of this group project into three. The first task was to develop the system database, followed by system implementation where coding is done and eventually report writing. Database development is a collective task that each member is involved in. as for system implementation, the application was divided into front end (interface) and back end implementations. Abbas worked on the Interface as Murshed worked on the backend implementation. Report writing was divided amongst us where project proposal and system design was worked on by Abbas whereas Literature review and methodology were worked on by Murshed.
- Individual Contributions
This is a statement showing each of the members’ contributions to the project. This being a group project, it is good to appreciate the effort of each group member in making this team task a success. In accomplishing this project, we gathered together and created the system’s database using the CSV files that were provided. The CSV files in a greater perspective gave light to the various functionalities that the system required to function as per its objectives. The designing of the tables was a collective task but however, the following responsibilities were assigned to the following group members.
Interface design – Abbas
The interfaces were dictated by the input requirements for each of the items that the system captures. For instance, in the staff category, there was a need to have created functionality where a new staff could be added to the system, Update functionality for editing and updating user data. It also requires that we have a delete functionality implemented in case the store wishes to do away with data pertaining to employees who no longer work for the store.
System workflow – Murshed
System workflows are a representation of how events in the system chronologically follow each other until there is a successful operation to the system’s database. For instance, in creating a user, the system will first authenticate the person who wishes to create a new user for the system. Once authenticated, the user is directed to their dashboard where they can access the create add user form. They are then prompted to input data that is validated before being stored to the database on clicking the submit button. The operation ends by reporting on the success or failure of creating the new user.
- FMIS Software with printouts
FMIS is an application that has a number of major components. There are various users in this system. These include staff, suppliers, and customers. The staff is responsible for operating the system. They are the data providers for the furniture that is being sold on Furniture Mart. Despite the fact that there are suppliers of this furniture, there is no interface for the suppliers to input data into the system. What they have provided is keyed in by the Furniture Mart store staff who are also responsible for completing several transactions on the system.
The system serves to display the various furniture that is on offer. The customers then view and are able to select which of the items they wish to purchase. They are then prompted to check out or even continue adding more of the furniture they are shopping for to their cart.
The key objective of FMIS is to provide data useful in decision making. It there has to have a number of implemented functions that will accept the raw data provided in CSV files and analyze it to come up with the relevant information required by the manager to make a decision pertaining to a scenario requiring one to be made. For instance, while selling products, the system should be able to do deductions in the relevant product store and once the reorder level is reached, it notifies the manager or the staff using the system that the product is nearly out of stock. They can then take it up and contact the supplier for the specific product to deliver more.
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