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Case Study: Australian Fashion Designs Background:
Australian Fashion Designs (AFD) is a Brisbane based business with design offices in both Melbourne and Sydney which has traditionally sold women’s clothing to retail outlets through sales representatives, and wedding dresses directly to customers through wedding representatives. The business works with two fashion clothing manufacturers in China and New Zealand, with delivery through the postal service.
The sales representatives are given their own retail stores to work with. This is so stores who are selling AFD products are not approached by more than one sales person. Depending on the number of stores, more than one sales representative may be assigned to one sales area. The retail stores are charged for the product at the recommended retail price less a discount. The amount of this discount varies according to the volume of stocks bought by the store and is normally assigned by the sales representative when they gain a new client.
The wedding representatives also sell the dresses at recommended retail less a discount which is the same for all wedding representatives. As these wedding representatives sell to private people rather than businesses, AFD does not want to keep a record of who they sell to. They must pay for any orders at the time they order however the head office wants to be able to see a total of how much they order every year. Depending on the volume of orders, more than one sales area may be assigned to one wedding representative.
The business was started by the business owner, Julia Spencer who initially undertook all the ordering and selling however the business has now grown to include both part- time and full-time employees. The organisation is also looking to expand further into men’s clothing. Currently the business still has manual stock control and customer relationship systems which have worked well in the past and an off-the-shelf accounting system which is used to manage the accounts receivable and accounts payable of the business.
Although the off-the-shelf accounting package is used and email for communication with suppliers and customers, there is currently a low level of computer use in the organisation. The sales people (both sales representatives and wedding representatives) use an AFD supplied phone and their own laptops, tablets, etc. to take and keep track of orders. The sales people phone orders in to head office and telephone to check on the progress of orders. This means that currently some staff at the head office almost exclusively handle telephone calls from sales people. These phone calls are often lengthy as some sales people only phone their orders in once a week, which concerns Julia Spencer as she does not know the value of the daily sales of each sales person, or who they are visiting as the sales people control their own schedule.
Although the manual systems for stock management and customer relationship management have worked in the past, Julia Spencer and the new purchasing manager Nicolas Steven and the customer manager Sheela Brown feel an information system could offer significant improvements to the work processes currently in place.
Sheela Brown would like the sales people to order products online as they make the sales. One of her requirements would be to enable the sales people to “check in” online at every retail outlet they visit whether they make a sale or not. This is so she can check
what sales calls they make. The sales people are concerned that this takes away the autonomy that they currently have. On the other hand, Nicolas Steven would like to run a report once a month that shows stock levels and how long each product line takes to sell. He would also like to make bigger orders more often to take advantage of smaller shipping costs per piece of merchandise and bulk ordering discounts offered by their suppliers.
Business Processes:
A JAD session with key stakeholders revealed the following information. The business processes described below are the system requirements for this information system solution:
- It has been decided to focus on building and implementing the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application and run a separate project for the purchasing project later. Therefore, do not model any of the purchasing system (this is where AFD purchase from their suppliers).
- Before a retail store can become a customer of AFD, they must fill in an application form. Applications are reviewed by the management team and not all applications are approved. AFD records the following details for all customers: Name, Address, Telephone, Email, Application date, Discount level, Sales area, and Date last visited. Additionally, AFD records Australian Business Number (ABN) for retailers only (not private customers).
- The geographical sales areas for the sales people have been defined for the whole of Australia using current population numbers. However, AFD does not yet have enough wedding representatives to cover all of Australia so some sales areas do not yet have a wedding representative assigned while some wedding representative are assigned to more than one geographical sales area in cities such as Melbourne.
- AFD wants to run a sales report on the last day of every month that shows the amount of sales, per sales area and per sales person.
- AFD also requires that the following information on each sales visit be kept, the customer, the date of the visit, sales people(s) who visited, and amount of order. Please note for unsuccessful sales visits to potential customers, it is planned that the customer is identified as “potential customer” when their record is created for each geographical sales area to track these visits.
- The wedding representatives are expected to manage their own customers and work load so AFD does not store any details of the weddings held.
- Any payments for salaries or expenses to sales people are outside the scope of this system
Task 1: Report
Part A
20 marks
The AFD management team has heard of agile and iterative systems development methodologies but is unsure of their effectiveness for their project as there is little knowledge about these in the organisation. Therefore, they want you to write a report discussing the four (4) various methodologies of agile and iterative developments. State under what circumstances each one would be used and then make a recommendation for this project. To do well in this report you must use the detail from the case study in your report as examples, rather than given general information.
The following sections need to be included:
o Generalintroductiontotheagileanditerativemethodologies.
o Methodology1
General discussion
Advantages
Disadvantages o Methodology2
General discussion Advantages
Disadvantages
o Methodology3
General discussion
Advantages
Disadvantages o Methodology4
General discussion Advantages
Disadvantages
o Recommendation
Your target audience is executive business people, who have extensive business experience but limited computing knowledge.
Your report should be no less than one thousand (1000) words and it would be best to be no longer than one thousand five hundred (1500) words long. Appropriate referencing is required. The textbook Satzinger et al. is a valid resource, however it is expected that at least five (5) other resources will also be used and cited.
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