Case Study: Special Jewellery Limited. All questions for assignment 2 relate directly to the information provided within this case study.
Background (as provided for assignment 1): Special Jewellery is a Brisbane based business which sells imported jewellery to retail outlets and through representatives who sell the jewellery at parties. The business purchases jewellery from a number of sources in both China and Italy, with delivery through the postal service.
The business was started by the business owner, Jane Freeburn who 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. 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.
The sales people are given their own geographical area to sell in. This is so jewellery stores are not approached by more than one sales person, however sometimes the sales people prefer to work in pairs, particularly if they are targeting new customers. More than one party plan representatives may be assigned to one sales area. The jewellery stores are charged for the product at recommended retail price less a discount. The amount of this discount varies according to the volume of jewellery brought by the store and is normally assigned by the sales person when they gain a new client.
The party plan representatives are also sold the jewellery at recommended retail less a discount which is the same for all representatives. As these party plan representatives sell to private people rather than businesses, Special Jewellery does not want to keep a record of who they sell to. They must pay for any orders at the time they order however head office want to be able to see a total of how much they order every year.
Although an 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 and party plan representatives phone orders in to head office and telephone to check on the progress of orders. This means that currently some staff at head office almost exclusively handle telephone calls from these people. The head office staff have got to know the sales people well as they have worked together for a long time and they often enjoy a chat about what is happening in head office, when the sales people phone to order. These phone calls are often lengthy as some sales people only phone their orders in once a week, this concerns Jane Freeburn 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, Jane Freeburn and her new purchasing manager, Max Weinburg and customer manager David Jones feel an information system could offer significant improvements to the work processes currently in place.
David Jones would like the sales people and party plan representatives to order products online as they make the sales. One of his requirements would be to enable the sales people to “check in” online at every jewellery outlet they visit whether or not they make a sale. This is so he can check what sales calls they make. The sales people are concerned that this takes away the autonomy that they currently have. While Max Weinburg would like to run a report once a month that showed stock levels and how long each unit of jewellery takes to sell. He would also like to make bigger orders less often to take advantage of smaller shipping costs per piece of jewellery 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 first build and implement the customer relationship management application and run the purchasing project at a later date. Therefore do not model any of the purchasing system (where Special Jewellery Limited purchase from their suppliers).
Before a jewellery store can become a customer of Special Jewellery Limited, that store must fill in an application. Applications are reviewed by the management team and not all applications are approved. Special Jewellery Limited records the following details for all customers: Name, Business number, Address, Telephone, Email, Application date, Discount level, Sales area, and Date last visited.
The geographical sales areas for the sales people have been defined for the whole of Australia using current population numbers, however Special Jewellery Limited does not yet have enough sales people to cover all of Australia so some sales areas do not yet have a sales person assigned while some sales people are assigned to more than one geographical sales area.
The management team would like to be able to run a report as they want that showed sales areas with no assigned sales person, those sales areas who do not have a dedicated sales person and the population in those sales areas’.
David Jones wants to run a sales report on the first of every month that shows the amount of sales, per sales area and per sales person.
David Jones 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 a customer called “potential customer” be created for each geographical sales area to track these visits.
The party plan representatives are expected to manage their own customers and work load so Special Jewellery Limited so does not store any details of the parties held.
Any payments for salaries or expenses to sales people are outside the scope of this system
