Cindy Bells is a small wedding shop situated in Brownhills, West Midlands that makes and sells its own dresses - the current system

Authors Avatar

Nikki Westwood 012

Cindy Bells is a small wedding shop situated in Brownhills, West Midlands that makes and sells its own dresses.

The orders are usually made in person, as a fitting is necessary.

All accounts are done by hand, and copies of orders for materials (usually obtained from Los Angeles), and customer invoices, are all kept in a filing cabinet at the rear of the shop.

With orders, the proprietoress, Cindy Costello, makes purchases over the phone, writing down what she has ordered on a piece of paper.

The problem with this is that this system is error-prone and unreliable. Post-It notes are usually just stuck on a desk or pieces of scrap paper are left lying around the office. For this reason, some essential work is sometimes forgotten.

When the order arrives, if the order has been written down to confirm the placement of the order, the piece of paper is filed, along with the order received documents.

When billing customers, she hand writes a bill, photocopies it, then gives the original to the customer, and files the copy.

The current system

Mrs. Costello is happy with the way that she does her invoices and orders, but acknowledges that this is very time consuming.

There is no log of stock, and the only way to tell if there is any stock, is to check the material box labels.

As the dresses are made by the shop, this leaves little time for accounts, with Mrs. Pearl Westwood (Mrs. Costello’s mother, shop worker and dressmaker) working up until 2am most nights.

Ideally, they would like a system that keeps a log of their current stock, whilst also being able to process orders and invoices using Information Technology.

They would also like to be able to save and enter the order details, without changing any pre-set information in the database. This would only take up a small area in the office, rather than a large desk and filing cabinets.

The program would need to be very easy to use and just as easy to retrieve particular data, such as order forms or fitting-times, etc.

If this was achievable, a lot less time would be consumed doing this during the day, enabling workers to finish work earlier, as the shop opens at 9am every morning.

Objectives of the new system

The new system should be able to:

  • Allow data from invoices and orders to be saved easily, without altering the original database.

  • Allow data from saved invoices and orders to be easily retrieved if needed for future reference.

  • Produce a stock list of materials available, for example if you entered data into the system describing how much material is used on one particular dress, you should be able to click on a separate file, that says how much material you have left, without checking in the store-room.
Join now!

Data Flow Diagram of Current System

A: The usual process of ordering a dress is face to face, rather than over telephone.

B: After the order has been placed, a fitting is needed, as all dresses are made to order, and therefore the sizes are individual

C: After the fitting, a stock check is made to see how much material is left.

D: A Daily job list is needed and is not in place at the moment.

E: After a stock check is made, the customer has ...

This is a preview of the whole essay