System Design Specification

Preliminary Investigation and Requirements Report Template

Version 0.0: 10/03/2021

Worksheet

Client approval: Yes X No

Note whether your case study needs to be ready in time for a specific event:

Date: 10/03/2021 Event: Week 4 – PIR Report – APUS-INFO498

Case Study for Ruben Keys and Lisa Tejada

1. GENERAL INFORMATION

Club IT Company profile

Company History

Club IT established in 2005, is an entertainment company.

It is a downtown music avenue whose co-founders and managers are Ruben Keys and Lisa Tejada, Business Administration graduates.

The company offers a wide range of music genres, and it has an annual music calendar where each month is allocated a type of music genre.

Lisa plays violin, whereas Ruben plays drums.

Club IT performs live DJs Tuesday every week who play a collection of MP3 playlists, playing hip-hop, techno, and electronic with some Top 40's thrown in.

Club IT has weekly live bands every Friday and Saturday.

Club IT offers dining services which include appetizers and beverages.

The company sells Club IT merchandise, including t-shirts, baseball caps, shot glasses, and glass mugs.

Mission statement

We, Ruben and Lisa, offer you live music, DJs, dance space, and refreshments

that suit your lifestyle. You are our friends, and we seek to build a community

that meets regularly at Club IT.

Club IT is currently experiencing a lag in the information management sector, and it wants to upgrade its inventory system to improve item tracking and purchasing. The company is frequently experiencing inventory shortages. Consequently, this affects the customers' experience in that customers face a big challenge when it comes to accessing popular menu items, product purchasing, and availability of the item purchased. You find that the lack of a guarantee that an item is available results in customer mistrust and dissatisfaction since they do not have confidence in the company's ability to supply the product the company claims to be selling. As a result, Club IT experiences lost sales, diminished company loyalty, and this jeopardizes its marketing efforts by obstructing sales planning mainly because substitution disguises the actual demand.

Club IT lacks a higher competitive advantage when it comes to customer satisfaction due to inventory shortages. Customers are most likely to go to other nightclubs that have readily available items. This implies that first-time clients are not likely to return, affecting customer recommendation, loyalty, retention, and poor reviews.

Club IT is currently running an interior renovation and remodeling. It has shifted its design from an old-fashioned wall club to a high ceiling and high-energy lighting design. The renovation creates and enhances the customer experience by creating an ambient of fun and energy clubbing environment.

The current information system environment operates on a single personal computer workstation. The workstation is located at the back of the office, which has a small space. The personal computer has a Windows XP Professional operating system that is outdated and a low-speed Pentium processor. It also has a display size of 17 inches which is relatively small for an employee working with tones of data in the inventory system. Additionally, the computer has 1 GB RAM, which is quite a small memory storage capacity for a computer that stores a vast amount of inventory data such as sales. It uses a Comcast internet, a non-wireless connection, and thus has a low internet connection speed.

At the moment, Club IT wants an inventory system upgrade where the system will automatically adjust the entry levels of items whenever a waiter or waitress orders an item. The system should also send an automatic notification order if the specified inventory conditions are met successfully. Besides, Club IT wants a system that generates reports and shows trends in sales of different products, the waiter with highest sales, time of the day if the highest sales affected the sales on other items, and a well-secured database.

Problem or Opportunity

Project Scope and Constraints

· Project scope

· The scope of this project is to provide the Club IT organization with an inventory management system. The system will have functionalities that enable Lisa and Ruben, the managers, to generate and show live sale reports. The inventory system will automatically adjust the entry levels of items whenever a waiter or waitress orders an item and send an automatic notification order of the ordered item if the specified inventory conditions are met.

· Project creep

· Club IT's project creep is attributed to the lack of a proper inventory management system. The creep has resulted in inventory shortages and surpluses due to the lack of an inventory feature that tracks the records of all menu items and products. As a result, this hinders timely delivery of menu items, inventory updates, and management of orders.

· Constraints

· At present, computer hardware and operating system are the significant constraints that Club IT is having. The organization requires to install an updated operating system and other inventory management software to control and record appetizers, beverage, and merchandise sales. It should also implement a point-of-sale system that tracks, automatically update inventory records of placed orders and gives a notification order if the provided inventory conditions are met to avoid inventory shortages.

In the future, the company's constraint will be upgrading the software to ensure automatic inventory updates. Another constraint will be training employees on how to use the inventory system, manage it, and keeping it secure from data security threats.

· Internal constraints include providing training programs to all staff to teach them how to use the new inventory system to make item orders. Suppliers for the food ingredients and beverages are the external constraints; this is in terms of their ability to supply the organization with the items on time.

Perform Fact-Finding

Fact-Finding

The fact-finding process involved research and site visits where observations of the work surrounding were made. Also, it involved face-to-face meetings where the managers, Ruben and Lisa, were interviewed to clarify facts and find out about the organizational processes, their major challenges encountered in their day-to-day operations, requirements, and preferences. A sampling of the existing system documentation, forms, and databases was done to collect factual reports. The staff was also given questionaries to gain insight into their operational challenges and proposed ways to resolve them. From the interviews, questionaries, and site visits, the following facts were collected.

· Club IT currently does not have an automated inventory management system. It has a manual inventory management system that uses manual forms which are used for making orders. These forms are collectively submitted to the managers, Ruben and Lisa, for recordkeeping and order approval.

· This month, they have experienced inventory shortage six times where they run out of popular menu items.

· Besides inventory shortage, Club IT has inventory surpluses for not popular items and items not in high demand.

· The lack of an automated inventory management system poses a significant challenge when making reorders for popular menu items such as beverages and appetizers for resupplying.

· The managers have experience using Microsoft Access for database management and Microsoft Excel for recordkeeping.

· Club IT computer software and hardware infrastructure is outdated.

· The managers have club operation experience.

Survey / Interview Questions:

· What is the background history of Club IT?

· What services do you offer?

· How well experienced are you with club operations?

· What are the main operation processes that you are currently dealing with? Explain how the ordering process flows from the beginning to completion.

· What are the pain areas or significant challenges that you experience with the day-to-day operations?

· Do you experience shortages of items with high demand or surpluses for items not in high demand?

· How frequently do you experience inventory shortages and surpluses?

· When do you make reorders from your suppliers? Is it on a weekly or monthly basis? If not, what criteria do you use to make reorders?

· What systems do you use to store inventory data and recordkeeping?

· How knowledgeable are you with the database management system?

· Explain the software and hardware infrastructure of the workstation?

· As far as inventory growth is concerned, do you feel the need to upgrade the infrastructure, or do you feel comfortable with the current infrastructure for future use?

Current Processes

2. REQUIREMENTS

List of Requirements

Functional requirements

Input

· The system must be able to allow a waiter and or waitress to make an order where they input the table number, the number of people making an order in that given table, the item of the order, the cost of each item, and the total amount of all items ordered for each individual. This input process will assign a unique ticket order that will be sent to the kitchenette or bar. The inventory system will automatically update the number of items purchased and indicate items ordered and the remaining inventory based on the items ordered.

Output

· The system must generate regular reports showing the item name, supplier, the ordered quantity, quantity at hand, and item cost. It must provide a notification for a low quantity flag on items below the quantity on hand threshold. Also, it should automatically reorder items whenever the notification alert is raised.

Process

· The system must be able to process multiple item orders for different tables simultaneously. Also, it must allow the ordered items to be delivered to the kitchenette or bar through the appetizer or drink order. Consequently, it must automatically update the remaining quantity available in Club IT's inventory. The system must generate a low inventory report and send it to the managers for resupplying when the inventory is low.

System requirements

· POS System

· The waiter or waitress inputs an order at the designated table area.

· The system generates an ordering receipt, prints it, and records it digitally.

· The item order recorded is automatically updated into the Perpetual Inventory System.

· Perpetual Inventory System

· It automatically acknowledges orders and uploads them into the inventory tracking system.

· The system automatically detects low inventory and alerts the manager for reordering.

· It generated purchase orders and cost of sales reports.

· SQL Database System

· The database system will use the perpetual inventory and point-of-sale databases linked to make up the inventory database.

· System will use an authorization mechanism to authenticate personnel to perform queries.

· System will use a query to return any inquired data.

· System will generate Excel exportable reports that can be printed and sent via mails.

Nonfunctional requirements

· Availability- the staff can use the system for 24 hours every working day. Upgrades and fault repairs are expected to take two to three hours during non-working days when the system is not on high usage. All features will be available in the next working day.

· Backup-the system can create a copy of data that will be used for recovery if the original data is corrupted or lost. Backups must be performed every day at midnight. A full backup must be done, and then the following subsequent backups will be incremental; this is the best since it occupies less space because it does not store duplicate data files.

· Data integrity- data stored in all databases must be valid, consistent, and accurate. Data must be validated to ensure that it is correct before being fed into the system. Also, the system must keep audit trails and logs to track data changes, detect data breaches, and identify the data accessed.

· Integrability- the system's inventory interfaces can be connected to other system components and effectively exchange data and work together. In the future, the MySQL database can be integrated with other systems, and that data will still be used without any restrictions.

· Performance- the system must have an average response time of 2.4 seconds to process each order request. Under a high workload, the system must have a response time of 3 seconds. Consequently, it will handle all employees' operations, process order requests, generate supply reorders and ordering reports.

· Reliability-the staff can make item orders ninety-eight percent of the time without experiencing failure or system lags.

· Transparency- the users can access information about the system's process, showing who did what and at what time to clarify who is responsible for every action.

· Privacy- each user must have log-in credentials to grant them access to the portal that they will use to make item orders. The password must contain at least eight characters where those characters must have special symbols, a letter, and a number.

· Security- the system will use a two-factor authentication to grant a user access to the database. Also, the administrator will verify the user's credentials and permit and restrict activities that a user can perform on the system.

· Usability-the system will have a user-friendly interface will simple icons and a layout that is easily understandable and easy to use.

ClubIT PIR CONFIDENTIAL PAGE 8