Evariste

Unfortunately, this was only the begin­ning. As com­pet­i­tion is get­ting fiercer, man­age­ment requires now the addi­tion of secur­ity fea­tures to the dif­fer­ent mod­ules. No cost price should appear in the ware­houses, and the goods receipts pro­ced­ure should be split in two steps:

13– The store­keep­er checks that the items and quant­it­ies are those that have been ordered, with no cost prices appear­ing on their ter­min­al screen.

14– The pur­chas­ing depart­ment then checks that the prices are in accord­ance with the pur­chase con­firm­a­tion they have received from the sup­pli­er.

As the pur­chase con­firm­a­tion is still a manu­al pro­ced­ure:

15– A new pro­gram­me has to be writ­ten for this pur­pose.

Procedure flow is now com­pletely under con­trol. Or is it? We have not fol­lowed up on the pay­ment terms and cus­tom­ers are get­ting more dif­fi­cult to corner to obtain pay­ment. We are now facing a cash flow prob­lem and are incap­able of pre­par­ing ourselves for the accounts pay­able sched­ule. We need a fin­an­cial agenda that will remind us of the dif­fer­ent pay­ments to be chased, and to pre­pare the sup­pli­er pay­ments to be made.

16– Management decides to com­mis­sion the devel­op­ment of accounts pay­able and accounts receiv­able applic­a­tions (A/​R A/​P).

17– The account­ing inter­face has to change yet again.

18– We need now an A/​P A/​R inter­face with invent­ory and account­ing.

Some whole­salers, with cash flow prob­lems, request that goods be left as a con­sign­ment, and that pay­ment be made if and when these goods are sold to the end user:

19– The ana­lysts devise a new type of trans­ac­tion: the con­sign­ment note.

20– It requires also an invent­ory card for each whole­saler, to allow man­age­ment to replen­ish the stock of the whole­saler when sales to the end user are made

Management will pur­chase data col­lect­ors to help sales­men with their phys­ic­al invent­ory at the whole­salers. The MIS depart­ment writes:

21– The inter­face to con­nect the data col­lect­ors to the applic­a­tion

22– The pro­gram­me that will gen­er­ate the sales order from the phys­ic­al invent­ory.

Real life Scenario

The busi­ness is now well estab­lished, and man­age­ment has decided to diver­si­fy. They will provide a wide choice of goods ran­ging from phar­ma­ceut­ic­als to spare parts, office fur­niture and food­stuffs. Management calls for a meet­ing with the MIS depart­ment to inform them that the com­pany needs to upgrade their sys­tem to cov­er the line of busi­ness, and that they need the upgrade ‘yes­ter­day’.

Management feels that the com­puter hard­ware should be upgraded to the latest in server tech­no­logy, and that the busi­ness out­lets dis­persed over the coun­try should logon to the sys­tem using the state of the art remote access tech­no­logy. Management also feels that the cur­rent soft­ware, hav­ing emerged from the hard earned exper­i­ence of being upgraded reg­u­larly, will need only small modi­fic­a­tions to become oper­a­tion­al.

But Management has for­got­ten that phar­ma­ceut­ic­als have to be traced with lot num­bers and expiry dates, that items under guar­an­tee should be traced with a seri­al num­ber and a guar­an­tee peri­od, and that a sit­ting room is a set of arm­chairs, sofas tables and oth­er accessor­ies, and that the cus­tom­er will nev­er take the set as a set: he will dis­as­semble the room, and the applic­a­tion will have to be able to do the same.

Management will also real­ize later that the com­pany will pur­chase items in lots and sell them by piece, weight, length or any kind of unit of meas­ure. Employees will need to identi­fy the dif­fer­ent items sizes using a dif­fer­ent bar­code and price for each size.

Management will pur­chase the items in con­tain­ers and will con­sol­id­ate orders from sup­pli­ers in one ship­ment. They will need to split the costs on the dif­fer­ent orders and have the aver­age costs of the dif­fer­ent items reflect these charges. They pur­chase in US Dollars, Euros, and British Pounds etc. They sell in any of these cur­ren­cies but not neces­sar­ily in the pur­chas­ing cur­rency and will like to eval­u­ate their stock in two ref­er­ence cur­ren­cies. Obviously, Management will need Management Reports in all these cur­ren­cies.

To be con­tin­ued.…