Approach to Systems Development

Discuss about the Report for Information Systems Analysis and Design of Data Collection.

The project report reflects on Australian Labs, that gives lab-testing services to the customers, doctors and medical businesses in Australia. The aim of this project plan is to develop the outdated inventory tracking system for the Australian labs. This development helps them in their testing services with updated information using the barcodes. It tracks the test request of the customers. The objectives of this project plan are as follows:

• To develop the outdated inventory tracking system of Australian Labs
• To track the requests of the customers and up-to-date the system for giving efficient lab services to the clients
• To become familiar with both functional as well as non-functional requirements of the development of inventory tracking system
• To estimate the time and cost benefit of the project plan

Rapid application development: This approach is used when a system is created and it is modularized within time of two-three months (Hoffe 2012). It reduces the time of development and increases the usability of the system components.

Agile methodology: It is a realistic approach towards system development. The resource requirements are less and the functionality of the system is developed rapidly. It is such an approach to software delivery, which builds software incrementally from beginning to deliver it all at one time, near the ending.

System Analysis and its activities

System analysis is defined as the process to observe the system for purpose of development. It requires analysis as per their propose design (Krajewski, Ritzman & Malhotra 2013). The major activities of this system analysis phase are the information flow, bottlenecks identification, recommended solutions for system development and operational data.

At the time of purchase of off-the-shelf software, the organization focuses on its products and vendors with criteria of price, response time, documentation, efficiency and vendor support. In the case study, this software is used as it helps to calculate the stock, store records of customers, write reports and access to business websites.

Functional requirements of inventory tracking system

Login into the inventory control system: The inventory can only access the system after log in using email id and password.

New member register: A new member should at first register with the system by giving their personal details and then they can login into the system.

View the inventory status: It allows viewing the inventory status with updated entities.

Search for item: A list of items and services are there, the user can search their required item from those lists.

Order item: The system captures the historical order data, display the current stock levels and allow for data validation.

View sold items: The sold items are viewed using this system.

Approve of request: It captures the received order and request. It also captures as well as edits the request status.

System Analysis and its activities

Receive inventory: Shipping notification is mailed to the customers so that they can come to know that their requested order is already shipped.

Pick order: A pick list is produced and created the pick list sort by the stock location.

Send of mail: The system must send an email to the customers when it meets certain conditions such as placing of order, sign up of customers.

Usability: The system must be easy to use by the inventory manager such that they are not required to read manuals. It must be quickly accessible.

Reliability: The proposed system should give proper inventory status to the user. It can add any vendors, testing offers and provide inventory status with updated entities.

Performance: The system must not lag behind. It must complete updating all the databases. All the system functions should be available to the user when they turned on the system.

Table 1: Cost benefit analysis

Work breakdown structure

Project Schedule

Figure 1: Gantt chart

(Source: Created by author)

System goals

The system goal is to reduce the stock outs of the inventory. It also reviews the total selling of their items on daily basis (Power, Sharda & Burstein 2015). The inventory tracking system should meet with its accuracy level.

System requirements

The system helps to login the registered user to check for inventory orders. It also helps to deal with the queries of customers.

System scope

The system scope is to develop the old inventory tracking system so that it meets with system requirements of Australian Labs. It also gives automatic inventory items in an efficient manner (Chang 2016).

Discussion

The schedule of the project plan is reasonable, as the main aim is to end the entire plan with estimated time.

Stakeholders involved

The internal stakeholders are employees, inventory manager, board of directors and investors. The external stakeholders are consumers, suppliers and regulators. 

Three traditional techniques to collect information during analysis

Observing users: It involves on observing people to analyze their working. Direct observation is best when detailed procedures are documented. This technique is scientific as it helps to collect primary information (Afergan et al. 2015). The main aim of this method is that it gives detailed analysis, which helps to achieve the organizational goals.

Administer Questionnaire: It involves with designing of questions as well as determines who are responding to it. It is best when most of people are involved.

Six sources of software

Document Analysis: It identifies written procedures, reports as well as other documents to identify the data that would target the current system (Baskerville & Wood-Harper 2016).

Usefulness of the mentioned traditional techniques

Observing users: It accesses to the situations when the questions as well as interviews are impossible to conduct. It is also strong on validity as well as in-depth understanding of the analysis. It is a direct method for collecting the data as well as information. The data, which are collected using this technique, is very reliable (Chang & Seibert 2016). It improves over the precision of the research outcomes.

Administer questionnaire: It gives practical data and large amount of data are gathered from large figure of population in very short period (Dennis, Wixom & Tegarden 2015). The outcome of this questionnaire technique is that it gives quantified results by use of software package and researcher.

Document Analysis: This method is used to investigate decision-making and allocation of resources (Kersting 2012). It overcomes with the difficulties of the participation by encouraging them. The data are collected from the academic literature, manuals and guides help them to collect accurate data.

Reflections and Conclusions

From the project plan report, the author achieves a new developed inventory tracking information system for the Australian Labs so that they can meet with the system requirements of the lab. The possible constraints are time and budget. Within the estimated time and budget, all the activities should be carried out so that they can able to complete the project in time.

It is concluded that the proposed system should be useful for the customers as it gives them information about timely delivery of their order. It also gives accurate information on their queries. The system updates all the information and makes the customers updated with current information.

References

Afergan, MM, Leighton, FT, Johnson, TP, Mancuso, BJ & Iwamoto, KG Akamai Technologies, Inc., 2015, Method of data collection among participating content providers in a distributed network. U.S. Patent 8,972,530.

Baskerville, RL & Wood-Harper, AT 2016, A critical perspective on action research as a method for information systems research. In Enacting Research Methods in Information Systems: Volume 2 (pp. 169-190). Springer International Publishing.

Chang, JF 2016, Business process management systems: strategy and implementation. CRC Press.

Chang, W & Seibert, JH Crashlytics, Inc., 2016, System and method for data collection and analysis of information relating to mobile applications. U.S. Patent 9,262,250.

Coronel, C & Morris, S 2016, Database systems: design, implementation, & management. Cengage Learning.

Dennis, A, Wixom, BH & Tegarden, D 2015, Systems analysis and design: An object-oriented approach with UML. John Wiley & Sons.

Hoffer, JA, 2012, Modern Systems Analysis and Design, 6/e. Pearson Education India.

Kendall, KE, Kendall, JE & Wasson, CS 2014, Systems analysis and design (Vol. 19, p. 02). Year Prentice Hall, 2011.

Kersting, WH 2012, Distribution system modeling and analysis. CRC press.

Krajewski, LJ, Ritzman, LP & Malhotra, MK 2013, Operations management: processes and supply chains. New York: Pearson.

Power, DJ, Sharda, R & Burstein, F 2015, Decision support systems. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Stadtler, H 2015, Supply chain management: An overview. In Supply chain management and advanced planning (pp. 3-28). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.