System Analysis And Design Process For Business Efficiency

The Importance of System Analysis and Design Process for Businesses

System analysis and design process is used by businesses to improve overall efficiency of business processes, solving internal issues and challenges and to capture more opportunities. There are direct impacts of the system analysis and design processes on the profitability of a business (Roebuck, 2012). The data processing activities are dependent on the daily business operations and transactions. System analysis and design helps a business to take a customised approach to assess the scope of an organisation (Dennis, Wixom, & Roth, 2012), then in finding out the benefits and loopholes in the business operations. It helps businesses to focus on the strong areas and then improving the weak areas. It also helps to explore the types of usage of different information systems in the business operations that will help to make the business processes more agile and more profitable (Klir, 2013).

The purpose of the work is to get experience in system analysis and design projects based on an imaginary case study. The details of the case study have been given and the task is to emphasise on the current system of the business and how that is running. The scope of the work in this assignment is on the current system rather than the any proposed information system. It does not cover the entire supply chain management process. But it covers most of the operations of the supply chain.

The report has been broken down into multiple sections and subsections. In the first part there are system analysis tasks like assessment of the scope of the current system in use in the business, the functional and non-functional requirements of the system and so on. Then in the second part of the report there are system design diagrams like the context diagram, data flow diagrams, ER diagrams and event table.

I have collected data from relevant sources. Business related data have been collected from the case study itself. Other information I have collected from the books (Roebuck, 2012).

Printing Incorporated Book Publishing or PIBP is an Australian publisher that specialised on feminist books. They take manuscripts from the authors and then turns the manuscripts into eBooks. Then the eBooks are promoted for sales and sold from the website of the company and other sources. Other sources include major outlets and online stores, Amazon store and so on. The reason is, they want to keep their online presence up to date. The business stresses on the electronic and digital printing formats. It publishes books in popular digital formats including PDF suitable for reading from Kindle like platform, and for printing, they also support MOBI format and ePub format. The main tasks are to publish an eBook online and maintain their e-commerce website so that customers can buy books from there and download after making the payment.

Scope of the Work in This Assignment

At first, an author is approached by a sales person. This is called the lead generation process. Now, more than one sales person reaches to an author. Once the author agrees to publish a book from the platform, then the publishing task begins. In the publishing task, manuscripts are taken from the authors and passed through bins for different phases of a publishing process. Staffs add notes on the manuscripts during the process. If an author asks for the status of a manuscript then the status is found by searching and then telling the author about the information.

Sales persons track their own data using their own systems. There is no centralized database covering the sales data from all sales person. It creates data processing overhead while reporting and business decision making.  

The current process is semi-manual process where computers are underutilized. Rather than using the standalone computers for different sales representative, the centralised database could be beneficial by connecting all data from a single data store. The current system is manually processing manuscripts. On the other hand, there are multiple online sales channels. The company earns from different channels, but there is no centralised solution to connect all sales figures and processing the same.

The scope of the system is limited within the manual manuscript publication, sales data analysis and managing online order processing systems. Rest of the operations of the business are not included in the project.

In this case, there is no information system available for the business. They use semi-manual process. So, the functional requirements will be the functionalities being followed by them without any help from an information system. At the same time, the non-functional requirements are the features and attributes that are used to represent the non-functional requirements of the current system of the organisation. A functional requirement is related to some activities involving data processing, calculation etc. on the other hand, a non-functional requirement is related to the attributes and features of the current system.

The functional and non-functional requirements are,

Functional Requirements:

· A sales person approaches to an author for lead generation · Author submit manuscripts to a staff · Staff adds handwritten notes to a manuscript · Staff is searching for the status of a submitted manuscript · Publish an ebook · Promotional events starts for an eBook · Customer purchases an eBook · Customer searches for an eBook · Prepare all sales report · Submit sales data · Prepare accounts details

Non-functional requirements :

· Security · Portability · Scalability · Accessibility · Integrity

Use cases will be generated from the even table attached in the appendix section.

Currently, PIBP is facing a number of challenges related to their business. The challenges are,

• The manual process of managing the operations has become out-dated and time consuming. At the same time, it is lowering the productivity of the staffs and the business process is taking longer time. The business process need more agility, efficiency and accuracy. Due to the manual process, incidents of wrong data entry, data loss etc. are very common. For example, manuscripts may get lost from one of the bins, or the notes added by the staffs may get lost. In that cases, the product will be developed with some errors.
• Lack of integration among the databases and lack of suitable information system has become challenging. There are data collected from different sources but there is no suitable business analytics platform that can use a centralised database to answer business management related queries like assessment of the performance of the sales staffs, automated tracking of the sales activities and so on. Without business analytics, it is difficult to gain competitive advantages and the business should focus on this area.

The data dictionary is developed in relation to the ER diagram given in the below section.

Table	Attribute	Data Type	Key
Book	Book_ID	INT	Primary
	Title	Text
	Subtitle	Text
	Num_pg	INT
	Type	Text
	ISBN	Text
	Sales_price	Decimal
	Sales_freq	Decimal
	Unit_cost	Decimal
	Qty_on_hand	INT
	Cat_ID	INT	Foreign key
	SSN_Author	Text	Foreign key
	Royalty	Text
Channel	Ch_ID	INT	Primary
	bookID	INT	Foreign key
	netSales	Text
	Dt_pub_sale	Text
	Dt_promo_sales	Text
Task	Task_ID	INT	Primary
	Task_name	Text
	Days_to_complete	INT
	Web_name	Text
	Sales_qtr	Decimal
	Start_Dt	Date
	Finish_dt	Date
Category	Cat_ID	INT	Primary
	Name_cat	Text
	Desc_cat	Text
Author	SSN	Text	Primary
	Author_name	Text
	[Address]	Text
	Pen_Name	Text
	bstTimetoCall	Texttext
	{phoneNumber}	Text
	Call_Dt	Date
	Call_time	Text
	notes	Text
Employee	Emp_ID	INT	Primary
	Emp_name	Text
	base_salary	Decimal
	Pub_comm	Decimal
	Promo _comm	Decimal
Customer	Cust_ID	INT	Primary
	Full_Name	text
	email	text
	{phoneNumber}	Text
	Is_Member	Boolean
Member	Member_ID	INT	Primary
	PaymentAC	Text
	Cust_ID	INT	Foreign key
Order	Order_Id	INT	Primary
	Cust_ID	INT	Foreign key
	Amt	Decimal
	Order_Dt	Date
	Item_qty	INT
	Purchase_price	Decimal
	Offer_price	Decimal
Payment	Pay_ID	INT	Primary
	Order_Id	INT	Foreign key
	Amt	Decimal

The processes in the system are manual processes. The description of the processes based on the level 1 DFD are,

• Staffs will manage manuscripts by placing those in the bins, adding notes on those, passing the manuscripts through the bins.
• Book is published when it is ready.
• Orders are managed by the staffs when come from online sources.
• Sales records are managed by staffs who collect and processes the information
• Sales persons are supposed to generate leads.
• Reporting are managed to provide critical support to business reports.Context diagram 

Context diagram is a special type of data flow diagram. It defines the boundary between the system and the external world. The entities from the external world interacts with the system bt exchanging data. And the system is represented by a single process.

It does not reveal any complexities of the internal processes of the system, or how it is implemented or any other technical details of the system. It gives the high level view of an information system. In system analysis, a context diagram is often used to understand the system boundaries and the context of the system. In the context diagram given above, a single process represents the current system of the company. There are external actors like the author, customer, manager, accountant, staff etc. All of them exchanges data with the system.

This is the top level data flow diagram created from the context diagram. It shows the primary processes of the system.

Rather than showing the details of the processes it shows the processes, the data store and the external actors of the system. The external actors exchange data between processes, data stores, and other external actors.

The entity relationship diagram of the current system has been given below. It shows a high level overview of the conceptual database design for the current system. There are primary entity sets like Book, channel, task, category, author, employee, payment, order customer and member. Each has its own primary key. The entities are related to one another using one to one, one to many and many to many relationships. 

The referential integrity of the entities and relationships have been represented using the foreign key concept and respective keys are added to the entity sets.

References

Coronel, C., & Morris, S. (2016). Database Systems: Design, Implementation, and Management. Cengage Learning.

Dennis, A., Wixom, B. H., & Roth, R. M. (2012). Systems Analysis and Design. NY: John Wiley & Sons.

Klir, G. (2013). Facets of Systems Science. New York: Springer .

Ramez Elmasri, S. B. (2016). Fundamentals of Database Systems. Pearson.

Roebuck, K. (2012). Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Aspley: Emereo Publishing.

Shelly, G. B., & Rosenblatt, H. J. (2012). Analysis and Design for Systems. NY: Cengage Learning.