Business Problem 3
SDLC design, development, and implementation 5
Requirements Checklist 6
User case diagrams for human interactions 7
User training 8
Maintenance activities 9
Referances 10
Business Problem
Udo, Marian, & Uduak Corporation (UMUC) is a private company in Kanzas focused on electronic services fro medical facilities. However, recently the managed not only to further develop and expand the precision electronic components, and replacing parts for medical devices portfolio, but also to introduced low voltage motors for saving emerge and rising efficiency. These devices can be used outside the medical industry, what makes them popular and appealing. That was the reason for expected growth in the number of orders. However, the new service turned out to be so essential that the company is experiencing considerable increases in customers’ orders for different products and services leading to inability to ensure an effective functioning of all current business process. (Apanasevic, Markendahl, & Arvidsson, 2016).
The existing process flow is presented on Figure 1.
Figure 1 UMUC billing and payment process flow
It is clear that current billing and payment processing is a multistep process affecting different departments with internal and external continuous data transfer/exchange. This principle structure is common and could be referred as a good practice, so the causes for inefficient work belongs to different category.
Additionally the current process is characterized by limited ordering possibilities, payment methods, long complex partially manual processing, thus, poor picking and ordering system is continuously jeopardizing the scheduling and billing processes of the company. Company’s IT support has done its best to improve and update the system according to the growing needs, but it has exhausted potentials and is unable to provide new effective solutions.
In future the company s planning to introduce the discount system. The overtasked staff will be unable to handle it properly and without the proper IT support it will definitely end up in multiple processing stops, incorrect calculations and customer displeasure. The current supportive actions and internal improvements are now unable to prevent future collapse, so to ensure best operation practice in future the new billing and payment system is needed.
Business Process Improvement
The business process improvement is based on a new IT solution. The interaction of various processes along with relevant data stores in the new system are presented on Figure 2. The new system will be answering customer, company manger, marketing and order and shipment departments. It focused on easy, fast and accurate initial data processing and reports generation
Figure 2: Context Diagram
The data flow diagram (Figure 3) shows that though the system is supposed to improve the business processing it is still client oriented, but with better automatic data transfer/exchange routing and clear exchange policies, as well as automatic template generator, calculations. This system is also flexible allowing to add features corresponding to updated marketing strategies like discounts or sales; it has also introduced possibility for future change in payment methods. On request this system can also be connected to the bank statistics and allow automatic payment status update, generation of a debtor list and penalty accurals. Though automatic, the system allows users to check it on any step or enter some data manually.
This technical solution will save time and make business processing effective, transparent and flexible enough to adopt new features and fit new strategies with minimal costs.
Figure 3 Level-0 Data Flow Diagram (DFD)
SDLC design, development, and implementation
Figure 4 Classical Warterfall model. Note: The deiagram retrived from Waterfall model (n.d.)
All parties were eager to get a solid supportive IT environment for their business, but onli if it has been justified to be useful, profitable and ready to use. The top-managers were not all at one in thinking that to solve the existing tension the company needs a new technical solutions. Thus, in order to bring this project from paper to life it was needed to present a final version at once and to demonstrate the potential benefits and motivation for the sceptics like the FCO, Karl Manly, who would only vote for a profitable technical solution and the CEO Tim Uduak, Jr., who prefers challenge the processes rather than the information technology breakthroughs.
So the project was lunched the first two steps in “Decide” section were completed internally and the external IT specialist have been introduced for further work including development of the context diagram, the data flow diagram (DFL).
Diagrammatic tools are very important for depicting a product or a service system, as being effective in displaying the concept and laying down the design for the envisioned system (Durugbo, Tiwari, & Alcock, 2011, pp. 1193). They also help the end user to understand the needs and potential of a given technical solution. The new system for UMUC has been shown through the Context Diagram and a Level-0 DFD that showed the interaction of its systems and sub-systems, external entities and data stores.
A Data Flow Diagram simply depicted and presented flow of data and its related processes. The Level-0 DFD for this document has been designed using the symbol sets defined under the diagramming methodology of Gane-Sarson (Pqsw.com, 2016). Pleasejing presents a context and a data flow diagram for depicting the flow of a process (Pleasejing's Weblog, 2007).
A context diagram showed the UMUC New System as a the central process, while Customer, Order Shipment Department, Marketing Sales and Company Management acted as the external entities that interact with the new billing system.
The perfect visualization was the key argument in the IT solution approval, as it demonstrated the potential benefits and the simplicity for an end user.
After the theoretical presentation, the technical visualization is done and the final product will be presented to an end user, who will be subjected to trainings before it is launched.
Requirements Checklist
Though the proposed new billing and payment system was developed in close customer-IT analyst/IT developer contact, the System Requirements Checklist will be filed to ensure the compliance with customers requirements. This checklist contains attributes featured by the customer as the key points for its effective business operation. Here the positions will be scored 1, if the requested attribute is present and fully functional, as well as user friendly (for users subjected to a training). The total core maximum is 11 and it should be met to ensure the accurate. The total score in Table 1 indicates that all customer requirements have been full fellfield.
User case diagrams for human interactions
The use case diagrams for the new billing and payment system are presented below. They represents use cases for three main users: CFO, Accounts Receivable (AR) and Invoicing.
It is clearly seen that all three key users affect the new system and interact with it different components.
User training
As the system is a new product and have a unique design and options is essential to tech the end user prior to the launch of the software. All company employee, who are supposed to use this system directly on indirectly will be subjected to the seminars/webinars. The training process summery and timing for different categories is presented below.
The first trainings will be held by the developer, who is to prepare all. The tutorials will be also available later on a help desk.
Maintenance activities
The new attributes can be added any moment on the customers request. It will be recommended to evaluate the given attributes at least every 6(six) month to ensure they are accurate and up to date. All user would provide their feedback on the potential useful attributes and/or needed upgrade for an existing ones.
The new user will be subjected to trainings, which can be held either by the developer or the local IT department, experienced users.
References
Apanasevic, T., Markendahl, J., & Arvidsson, N. (2016). Stakeholders’ expectations of mobile payment in retail: lessons from Sweden. International Journal of Bank Marketing, 34(1).
Durugbo, C., Tiwari, A., & Alcock, J. R. (2011). A review of information flow diagrammatic models for product–service systems. The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, 52(9-12), 1193-1208.
Pleasejing's Weblog,. (2007). Context diagram & Diagram 0 DFD _ Week 4. Retrieved 7 February 2016, from https://pleasejing.wordpress.com /a-context-dfd-diagram-0-dfd-_-week-4/
Pqsw.com,. (2016). Context Diagrams: An Explanation. Retrieved 7 February 2016, from http://www.pqsw.com/hjsasp/gn02.cfm?SI=43479230767&ID=921210469186
Waterfal model (n.d.) Retrived 28 February 2016 from http://www.coleyconsulting.co.uk/waterfall-model.htm
