Management Information Systems Case Study
Introduction
SAM Bakery makes commercial breading foe sale to various businesses. Commercial breading is sold to fish packing plants ( to make breaded fish sticks ) and major fast food suppliers such as Kentucky Fried Chicken and MacDonald. Commercial breading is baked in huge ovens, with a continuous steel belt that carries bread from dough through the baking process. The baked loaves are then ground up and bagged. Most sales for breading are for truckloads (一貨車之量) or even rail cars of breading. People in England eat a lot of fried chicken.
The main ingredient (烹調的原料) of breading in flour. Most breading actually use a blend of flours, to which are added the spices (香料,調味品) and flavorings (調料,香料) that make the breading taste just the way the customer wants it, and some preservatives (防腐劑). SAM keeps a number of recipes (烹飪法,食譜) for various kinds of beadings for each of its customers.
When the customer places an order, SAM checks its inventory to decide whether it can satisfy the order from inventory, or must produce a new batch of breading. Each batch of breading is date stamped, so SAM will know when it is no longer saleable. SAM schedules production several days in advance. Sometimes SAM knows that orders will come in for certain beadings, and it keeps up production to meet the predictable demand. Sometimes customers place extra orders. Fish packing plants, for instance, are likely to put in extra orders at certain times as more fish are caught at those times.
SAM keeps considerable information about its business. At the moment, all information about the manufacture and sale of breading is kept in paper records. SAM keeps the following kinds of information:
ª Manufacturing information – the recipe for each kind of breading, which consists of a list of ingredients, any special baking and bagging instructions, and the shelf life of a batch. There is also data for quality testing each batch – the tests to be performed and the standards the breading from that batch is to achieve.
ª Information about raw materials – which ingredients are maintained in stock, where they come from, how much they cost and what quality standards they meet. Most of the raw materials are different flours, which are purchased in bulk.
ª Inventory of finished product – how many kilograms of each kind of breading is stored, and where it is kept. The inventory does age, so the age of each batch is also recorded.
ª List of clients – the names and addresses of clients. Reports about the amount and type of breading purchased are stored in each client file.
ª Invoices and accounts – all the invoices for breading deliveries and all accounts sent to clients are kept. Ledgers foe each client are also maintained. Similarly, accounts are kept for each purchase or raw materials.
SAM have come to you help them get this information into electronic form. The company would like to design a database that will allow them to generate an invoice for each sale, a monthly account for each client and a full inventory of raw materials and finished breading.
Your task is to create a schematic (概要的) design for the database that will store the information for SAM. What you should produce is a basic set of forms for inputting the data, editing the data and searching for the data. These may all be one form, or you may create a different form for each action. You may create multiple forms as well, so you could create different search forms for different kinds of data. In this assignment we are looking only at the information you think you need on the form.
To guide you in creating these forms, you should answer the following questions:
Questions 1: How is SAM going to use this information? What does it want to accomplish by storing the information in this database? The use of the information will determine what to collect and how to link the information.
Question 2: What information must be included in the database to provide the functions it is to achieve? Which items of information should be in separate fields because users will want to access them separately, and which items can be grouped with other information?
Question 3: How much information should be kept, and how should the information be organized? Remember that SAM will have to keep information up to date, so the more it keeps, the more it has to edit and update. As well, the more information in any one data collection, the more the storage requirements and the slower the database performs.
Your paper should consist of answers to these questions and an introduction to your design. You can put the design pages as an appendix. The purpose of the assignment is to have to struggle with information design. Your design is the first general overview of the information needs. A database programmer will take it and create the actual database. You need to specify what information is needed and how it will be organized.
0 comments:
Post a Comment