Business Information System Analysis And Development

Analysis and identification of the problems of Kinky Feet

Discuss about the Business Information System Analysis and Development.

Kinky Feet is a startup business organisation that is related to the show designing and production business owned by Selvi. Even though the business has potential but due to some operational and financial issues it is facing different kind of issues that are affecting the performance of organization in the market.

This report contributes to the identification of the business problems that are being faced by the business organization Kinky Feet within and outside the organization. In addition to that the report also consist about the discussion about the classification of the identified problems, key stakeholders, the problem owners. More over the possible tools, techniques used to analyze this problems are also described in this report.

Financial issues: Initially the Sales of the products of the Kinky shoes were being limited due to the limited production capacity of the old manufacturing equipment.  Even though the Kinky Shoes has a reputation of a reliable manufacturer in the retail shoe market but due to cash flow problems in the organization the owner of the organization Selvi cannot afford the purchase of the new manufacturing equipment (Romiszowski 2016). As Selvi does not want to share the control of the business with anyone else, thus she refuses to take a business partner.

Lack of support of information system:  As the company is not using any kind of information system to coordinate different kind of business processes such as ordering of the raw materials for the production, management and analysis of sales data, calculation of finished goods against the acquired raw materials etc.  In addition to that the lack of information and coordination between the different departments such as manufacturing and sales makes the whole business more complex. As the sales department of the organization does not have any knowledge about the new products, designs in the manufacturing department therefore the potential new customers are note informed by the sales staff (Romiszowski 2016).  In some case, the sales staff makes extravagant claims to the retailers which results into costly overtime payments to the manufacturing process to meet the deadline and supply the orders.

In addition to that the lack of the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) in the business process, makes it very complex for the managers to sync all the operations as per the requirement of the customers (Dennis, Wixom and Tegarden 2015). The use of the Information systems like Navision can help the sales staff to get information about the production schedules, current stock levels, shipping and delivery dates for   a particular retailer.      

Classification of the Identified Problems

Lack of balance between the Manufacturing and inventory levels:  Due to the lack of coordination and flow of information between the different departments it is seen that there is no balance in the manufacturing process and management of the inventory levels of raw materials. Again as pointed out by Sam, there are leakage in the roofs of the inventory which may cause in the exploitation of the raw materials to the rain or humidity.  This leads to the loss of the raw materials and funds to acquire them.

The hard systems can be defined as the system which is intended and can be engineered to achieve objectives.  In this case the objectives are business objectives.  On the contrary soft systems, is thinking about the systems like the process of engaging with the world in order to learn more about a given condition in order to gain systemic insight of  a problem.

In the given case study the lack of a centralized information system can be defined as the hard system problem.  Whereas the lack of coordination between the different departments can be defined as the sot system problem (Romiszowski 2016). As the soft system problems are usually organizational problems that are poorly defined, different stakeholders   understands and interprets the same problem in different perspectives.

On the other hand the hard system problems are well defined problems and can be solved considering the technical factors.  The hard systems are considered as the rigid procedures and techniques which can provide unique solutions to well-defined problems mainly focused on computer implementations thus the lack of the information system is considered as the hard system problem.

 The main stakeholders and the problem owners in the given case study are the customers, Owner of the company Selvi, the Production manager, financial manager and the sales staff of the company.   Due to the lack of new manufacturing equipment’s the customers receive their ordered products quite late as when demand of the product is at its peak. This is because the reorder levels for the raw materials is managed manually as the company has not installed business automation system which they could use in predicting the demands of the products  so that they can efficiently  adopt with the changes in the market (Dennis, Wixom and Tegarden 2015). This issue automatically creates a negative impression on the customers as they are not getting their orders on time.

Identification of the key stakeholders and problem owners

On the other hand, the sales staff of the organization are facing issues in managing the orders from the retailers. As the company is maintaining a single stock item number to describe one style of shot to the customers which meant that the sales staff of the organization need to manually maintain the colors and sizes required by a specific retailer in the market.

Additionally, the financial manager of the organization maintaining the reports and other financial transactions manually that consumes lot of time and error prone. Due to this there are complexities in the processing of the payments received from the customers and payment done against the raw materials to the suppliers.    

 Requirement Analysis modelling:  This technique includes several sub stages, such as Elicitation of requirements, prioritization and recording of the requirements. In the first stage the task is to communicate with the stakeholders and users to determine their requirements (Romiszowski 2016). This is sometimes also called requirements gathering phase. In the next phase the ambiguous requirements are eliminated. At last the requirements are documented.

Use case modeling tool:  This analysis tool helps in providing an accurate picture of the desired functionality of a proposed system and describes the system from the user perspective.  It clearly defines the way a system should perform for and specific course interaction (Dennis, Wixom and Tegarden 2015). In this technique diagrams are used to explain every attributes and their interaction with the system. This is mainly used to show the relationship between the actors and interaction between the actors through the system.

	Problem-Oriented	Product Oriented
Conceptual	1.As the production of the shoes can come to an end due to shortage of the raw materials this   Can be addressed by introducing   an automated reordering level for raw materials in order to stream line the production process.	2. The company needs to install an Information System to keep track of their production process, ordering of raw materials and performance in the market.
Formal	3.  Using the implemented information system they can easily retrieve the information about the demand in the market and also gives brief details about the products that they are manufacturing.	4.  The information system can help Kinky Feet in achieving their business goals by making better decisions with the help of this information system.

Table 1: Matrix of methods

(Source: Blum 1994)

Conclusion

The business is facing difficulties in operating the business as the impact of some technical and non-technical issues Such as lack of automation in the manufacturing and other business processes, ordering process etc. This can be eliminated using the new manufacturing equipment’s for the business and acquiring an information system for the organization. This will in turn help the organization to stream all the business processes enhance the coordination between the different departments.

References

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