Mamma Mia Foods, Inc. is a well-known food products manufacturer headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri but with sales offices throughout the US. They make several products but their main one is dry pasta of all types: spaghetti, rottini, etc. In addition, it has seven large manufacturing / distribution centers in major areas of the country, from where the products are shipped to customers. The main manufacturing / distribution center is also located in St. Louis, next door to the company's headquarters. Sales for last year were in the $1.5 billion range, with sales expected to be slightly higher this year.
The company is well-run and profitable thanks to its high sale volume. As many companies in the food industry, however, it avoids the cutting edge in information systems and has instead chosen to be a follower of technology, letting other companies experiment with new stuff before adopting it on their own. Their main information systems have been implemented through a patchwork of packaged and home-made applications, mostly well-integrated and running efficiently in the company's Solaris servers and Oracle database. The systems currently implemented cover the following company areas: Finance, Manufacturing, Purchasing & Inventory, HR & Payroll, and Sales & Distribution.
Although some small systems still run on a client-server, two-tier architecture, most systems are run in at least a three-tier architecture, using a web browser as the presentation layer and Solaris servers as the Database and Application layers. All servers are centralized in the St. Louis data center, with a powerful and redundant WAN extending access to all company locations nationwide. Client stations have been standardized on Windows XP SP3 running on Dell desktop / laptop hardware, with sufficient memory and hard disk for efficient processing. Sales personnel login to the corporate network through a secure VPN used from their laptops.
The Need
Joe Bianchi, the Administrative Manager for the manufacturing plant in St. Louis, controls a replacement part inventory that the plant uses for maintaining the various equipments which the plant operates. Pasta manufacturing is a complex industrial process, requiring huge machines that are half a block long and two stories high. These machines have innumerable subsystems and components, each of which requires replacement parts for their scheduled maintenance.
Larry Rossi is Joe's Inventory Supervisor and he maintains good control of the spare parts inventory with a manual system consisting of forms and a manual card-based inventory system. Although this system has worked well in the past, in recent years Mamma Mia has upgraded a number of subsystems in the pasta production machines with more modern ones and as a consequence the number of inventory items maintained in the system has increased by a factor of 2 or more, making this manual control consume more and more people each month. Joe has authorized the increases in headcount in the inventory area, but he has recently been ordered directly by Mr. Giuseppe Camilli, the company CEO, to reduce headcount in the inventory area. It's unusual for the company CEO to meddle in such affairs, but Mamma Mia is a different type of company. Mr. Camilli likes to personally tour all company areas periodically and he was shocked to see the great number of people working for Larry when he visited that area a couple of weeks ago. (In Mr. Camilli's own words, Larry was living a "tropical fantasy" by having so many people on board -- Mr. Camilli reserves that term only to those situations where he is really irritated by something.)
After thinking about the problem for couple of days, Joe sat down with the Mamma Mia IT people and requested a technology solution for the problem. The fact that Mr. Camilli himself is backing the request and is closely watching the results adds an interesting twist to the matter. What Joe wants is a computerized spare parts inventory system that will help him maintain the current controls --which are "perfect", in his own words-- but with less people, thus complying with the CEO's orders.
The Requirements
1. Basic description:
a. This application handles a replacement parts inventory for the maintenance department of Mamma Mia.
b. For lack of a better name, we'll call the inventory application "PartsHaven".
c. PartsHaven is an abridged version of what a real inventory application would require. All basic elements are present, although simplified.
d. As stated, PartsHaven maintains an inventory of replacement parts for a plant maintenance department. There are approximately 45,000 parts and 50 technicians requesting parts. The company replenishes its inventory from about 750 vendors.
e. PartsHaven should provide for adding, viewing, modifying and deleting parts from the item master.
f. PartsHaven should provide screen transactions for:
i. Issuing parts to technicians.
ii. Receiving parts from vendors.
g. The replenishment process is based on a daily report that is produced and which includes all items with quantity on hand below the "minimum" quantity specified in the Item Master. This daily report is used as a "Purchase Order" once is it reviewed by the Maintenance Dept. This purchase order should be issued with both our item codes and the corresponding vendor's item codes.
2. PartsHaven's item master file should have the following data elements:
a. Item code with 12 digits.
b. Basic description.
c. Extended description.
d. Quantity on hand.
e. Unit of measure, like "Gallon", "Pound", etc.
f. Minimum quantity.
g. Maximum quantity.
h. Location, consisting of Aisle, Shelf and Bin numbers.
Please find attached a collection of all forms used in the current system.
The above is only a small fraction of the requirements, but it's all that Joe and Larry were able to come up with... Some detailed systems analysis is in order here! Please be sure to dig deeper into the analysis as there are very many unstated requirements in the simplified list above.
Larry Rossi, the person that knows more about the replacement parts inventory, and who will be able to reply to all questions you may have about requirements and how things work in Mamma Mia, is available to you as a special Discussion Forum in the classroom. Your professor will of course play the role of "Larry", the PartsHaven user, and the questions posted there will be replied to as quickly as possible. It is advisable to check the forum for previous replies, since it is possible that the same question may have been asked before.
The Forms
In the attachment you will find forms, reports, and some other documents used in the current manual process:
1. Organization chart.
2. Parts Return form.
3. Pick List form.
4. Purchase Order form.
5. Purchase Requirements List form.
6. Putaway form.
7. Stock card.
The Deliverables
You are asked to analyze this situation and produce an information system design that complies with the user requirements. The specific deliverables for this Final Project of the course are as follows:
1. Analysis:
a. Requirements list.
b. Use case documents (at least three.)
c. DFD diagrams (context, level 0, and level 1.)
d. ERD diagrams.
2. Design:
a. System specification
b. Implementation alternatives matrix.
c. System architecture.
d. Physical ERD and database design, including estimated database size.
e. Structure chart.
f. Program design documents (at least three and be sure to include some pseudocode in the description.)
g. Test plan.
h. Implementation plan.