Below are the latest Update for those who have submitted
CP 571 Business Information Systems
Tutorial 1
Name of Students :
Dear Students,
I have read some of the outline plan and they are really good. But you could do better and with more exploration if you have more assumptions.
These are the students who have already submitted Case Study 1
Case Study 1 - Kewl Cookies
Name of Student
10. Briefly explain each of the following terms in relation to e-business:
Channel conflict, Creative destruction, Globalisation
Case Study No 4
Ragnarok Video
Competition in the home entertainment market is intense and for the main part it is dominated by a few large corporations such as “Blockbuster”. There are exceptions such as Ragnarok.
The business was established in 1987 by Michael and Kevin, two science fiction fans who could not get the videos that they wanted from their local video store. Their thinking was that other people with similar interests would pay to rent movies. Initially they ran the business out of a small shop a few kilometres out of the town centre and soon other science fiction and fantasy fans were driving anything up to 16 kms to hire videos. In the early days customers were given 6 cards which were used to record video hires. Each video had its own envelope and when a video was hired, one of the membership cards was put into the envelope which was then placed in “Hired tray” with the due date for return written on it. Customer tracking was a manual process and reserving videos was an ad hoc procedure at best.
For the first three years business was steady but the early 1990s saw a period of substantial growth. In 1993 Ragnarok Videos moved to its present location on the outskirts of the city’s business district. The new premises had much more space so Michael and Kevin were able to diversify into cult TV, Festival films and foreign language films to serve the diverse local population. Finally in 1995 they moved into mainstream entertainment and began to offer the same range of popular films as might be found in any of the “Blockbuster” movie stores. Such a varied stock and high volumes of business became impossible to handle manually and so an off the shelf, point of sales system was installed. Every item has a barcode and a corresponding entry in the electronic stock catalogue. The system was intended to handle sales rather than hires so reservations, enquiries and product tracking are difficult but it has reduced queueing at the checkout. The system has been in place for 7 years now and while much of the hardware has been replaced, the software has just been ported from one platform to the next, largely unaltered.
Michael and Kevin continued their policy of growth and dreamed of having the largest video collection in
A national chain has expressed an interest in acquiring Ragnarok and is offering reasonable terms and continuing employment for Michael and Kevin. However the founders are not keen to surrender their independence and control.
Ragnarok needs to have a reasonable amount of stock on the shelves for customers to browse through, while some customers come in with specific requests, most simply make a selection from what is on the shelves. At any point in time no more than 20% of the stock is out on hire. When customers ask if a particular item is available, a staff member makes a quick shelf check. If the item is not found then he/she consults the electronic catalogue to see when it is due for return and offers to reserve it, however reservations are something of a hit and miss affair if a customer is overdue in returning videos. The business operates 7 days a week from 10 am to 10 pm with 70% of weekly earnings being generated on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Videos/DVDs are divided into two categories; Weekly and New Release. New release videos are charged out at $6.00 per night and weekly hires are charged out at $3.00. Customer loyalty is good with most customers visiting the premises at least every two weeks.
A lease on one of the buildings opposite will become available in 8 months time. Michael’s informal contacts with the local council have told him that a change of use application has been made. It seems that the fruit and vegetable shop is set to become a rival video store. Michael believes that one of the national chains is targetting their business.
If Michael and Kevin ignore the situation they will end up losing their business, Ragnarok does not have the resources to fight a price war with the new video store which is backed by a national chain. If they accept the offer for their business and sell out then they lose their control and independence. Somehow they need to trim costs, reposition the business and increase income and profit. Kevin’s idea is to try to generate new customers by advertising and try to compete with the new video store when it opens. He argues that they must act now. Michael’s approach is to try to generate more income from the customers that they already have but this would involved replacing the older POS system with a newer version that allows product tracking and customer profiling. If anything this will cost more than Kevin’s advertising campaign. Currently stockouts (all available copies of a video are out on loan) and the lack of a reliable reservation system are causes of customer dissatisfaction. The problem is that the bank is not prepared to loan any more money until they can see a revised business plan. Kevin has suggested putting the business online since most of their customers have Internet access.
Ragnarok has engaged a consultant to advise on how best to turn the business around.
Questions:
1) Consider Kevin’s idea of putting the business online, is it feasible to do so? What factors should be taken into account?
2) What broad strategies would you suggest to ensure the immediate survival of the business? Do you think that the Bank will find these sufficiently good to justify a business loan?
3) Outline the requirements for an information system for Ragnarok. (i.e. what must the IS be able to do? What activities should it support?) – remember to think about integrating business processes and supporting them with the IS.
4) Think about the way that the information system should operate. What sort of queries should it be able to handle? What sort of users will it serve? Any system will require that videos and DVDs are catalogued. How would you catalogue them? (Hint: Think about the sort of things that you might want to search for, categories need not be mutually exclusive.
5) Consider how you would handle marketing. Do you agree with Kevin’s view or Michael’s? Given the cash starved nature of the business currently, any marketing has to be cost effective, what specific things would you suggest?
Dear Students,
I have read some of the outline plan and they are really good. But you could do better and with more exploration if you have more assumptions.
These are the students who have already submitted Case Study 1
Case Study 1 - Kewl Cookies
Name of Student
Below are the latest Update for those who have submitted
CP 571 Business Information Systems
Tutorial 1
Name of Students :
“Let me get this right,” began Sarah, “instead of users inputting their own superannuation details into our systems using a web-based system, they have to fill forms in and submit them to a clerical officer for updating? And the same thing applies if they need to file a change of name or address? I know this is a government organisation and that we are under-funded but we must be able to do better than that surely?”
“That’s pretty much it” answered Azhar, “but it’s actually more complicated than that. The system runs on an old PC and prepares a file for submission as a batch job to the mainframe. It was developed in version 2.3 of the software, which is no longer supported by the software company - in fact the software company went broke 6 years ago. The software needs to run on an old 486 processor because of specific hardware requirements which are unique to that software. We can’t just switch to using something else because there is no off the shelf software that we can buy, the mainframe character and file formats have to be preserved and the word length of PCs that succeeded the 486 machines is different. We have been looking for suitable software for ages – I thought you knew”
“So what happens if that 486 PC dies?” asked Sarah.
“That really depends what it dies of …” began Azhar “We keep regular backups, and I have a whole range of salvaged spares for the 486 – enough to build three complete computers if need be.”
“Can we develop our own software? We have enough programmers.”
“Well we could but we have no design documentation or source code and the people who developed it left the department ages ago. We could buy new software and then convert all the stored data into the new format – we’d also need to change the mainframe code – unless we ported the system onto a PC platform with a PC based server. I guess that last option would cost about RM50,000, not counting a new server. The other option would be to write our own software – I wouldn’t like to put a timeline and cost to that, but it would be expensive. It’s not the future that worries me so much as the present. With the current turnover of staff and changes to superannuation, names, addresses etc. I have one person working 45 hours a week just to keep up. Even then it can take up to two weeks for a change to be logged on the mainframe. When we finally run out of spare parts for that PC – we have real problems.”
“Not quite” said Sarah, “You are the IS manager, you have problems. You have been with us for over 11 years and you let this happen. I’ll give you a week and by then I expect to know just what you plan to do to solve this and what you can do to prevent a recurrence of similar problems in the future. Otherwise we may have to review your position here.”
“You try it! I’ll bring in the union and make a real issue of this. There’s only so much that can be done within the confines of the budget I get to work with. We can’t afford top notch people, new hardware and extensive upgrades and all my attention has been on keeping the mission critical systems running – payroll, accounting, the HRM database – plus the network. All of those are running well – the network and main systems have over 98% uptime and most of our help desk calls are resolved in less than 20 minutes. We have no budget for new projects. While superannuation etc. is important it’s not vital. If it takes a week or two before everything gets updated then so what? We both know that a new system would pay for itself in two years or so – but we need to have the money up front to develop the new system and it is not forthcoming. I made requests for funding 5 years ago, 4 years ago and 3 years ago. Eventually I got sick of asking. It's not my fault and it shouldn’t be my problem. You have been here for 3 years – didn’t you take the trouble to find out what had been going on when you came here?”
Sarah realised that they were getting nowhere, “One way or another 30,000 people rely on that system – we have to sort something out. What are the big costs associated with a new system? And why is it so expensive to write our own software?”
“Well we need a dedicated server and network upgrade and the data conversion is a significant cost. We might only really need a snapshot of how things are now – the main database keeps track of payments and other employee records” Azhar responded “but even if we could reduce the cost of conversion somehow, we’d still need to find the funds to develop and run the system. In terms of the costs of a new system is that you only see what is on the screen, we have to produce code that implements our security and authentication procedures. Given the nature of the application validation and quality testing would be significant costs. Bear in mind my staff are really maintenance programmers – they seldom cut new code and a web based system would be a new thing for them. Also because we are slightly understaffed I would have to pay staff overtime rates or outsource the project. Either of those options would cause a budget blow out. – unless of course you have any ideas about how to fund the project?”
“Why can’t we just get someone to input the changes directly to the mainframe?” asked Sarah “That would overcome the PC bottleneck.”
“That had crossed my mind” said Azhar “but there are some difficulties with that – giving a user direct access to the mainframe has security implications – and in any event that only moves the bottle neck from one place to another. Given the age of the main systems, it’s easier to work around them. Creating a file with the updates is the only way to go.”
“Leave it with me …” said Sarah “I’ll explore a few options”
Questions from Case Study 3 HRM
1. Whose side would you take in this argument? Why?
2. Speculate as to what circumstances led to the present state of affairs. How many were preventable?
3. Do you think Azhar has behaved sensibly in regarding the superannuation system as low priority?
4. Is there anything else that Azhar can do in the short term?
5. Consider Sarah’s position. What will happen if she fails to find funding to improve or replace the system?
6. Lack of funding is a major problem in this government department, how would you go about building a case to support an argument for a new system? What funding options would you suggest? (be creative/radical if need be)
7. If funding were to be found, would you develop the project in house or would you bring in an outside company (outsource) to do it? Explain why/why not.
8. Could you establish guidelines to prevent similar problems arising in the future? If so what would they be?
9. Government departments are not-for-profit organisations. Does this mean that will always tend to be underfunded? Or are there exceptions? (Think of some of the government systems that you know about and what purpose they serve.)
Zainudin Johari
Upon Completion of this module, participant will be able to: 1. List Down the 5 Steps Of Making a “Roti John” using a Mobile Stove. ...
