KUMARAN 10H

BACKGROUND INFO

My brother is an ice cream salesman. He owns an ice-cream van along with his best friend and they drive around selling ice cream to people. They don’t both work at the same time and they take it in shifts to sell. My brother likes to sell ice creams because he likes to help people and make them happy. One of the reasons he and his friend decided to start selling them is because ice-creams are very popular and liked by everyone. They also went in to this business because they discovered that they could earn a surprising amount of money from it, providing they find a good place to sell. They mostly sell them in central London near any parks or major tourist attractions, because these are the places that get most business. This is not my brother’s only job; he also has a part-time job and so does his best friend. During the weekdays they don’t sell ice creams much, only on Mondays and Fridays and they only sell ice creams from 4.00PM to 7.00PM. My brother works on Monday and his friend works on Friday. Weekends are when they do most of their business and they take it in shifts. My brother work in the mornings from 7.00AM- 1.00PM and his friend works part time during this time and then at 1.00 my brother hands the ice-cream van to his friend and he carries on from 1.00PM to 7.00PM, while my brother starts his part-time work. Since they live in England the weather isn’t the greatest all year round! In the winter, when it becomes too cold they stop selling ice creams and they usually ask for a full-time job at their current workplaces and when summer arrives they start to sell ice creams. They have been selling ice creams for ten years now and they still enjoy it. They have made lots of friends with regular customers, made a good profit and it makes them feel happy. They get a lot of customers and record all the transactions and details of business in a book they call their ‘records book’, which is regularly checked so that the profit is split equally between my brother and his friend. Their business relies heavily on this book. They records things like, which ice-cream gets sold the most and the least - so they knows which ones to buy and stock, money transactions, profits earned, business records and the peak moments for selling - which day of the week, time. They are both good at mathematics and they do all calculations in their heads. I work as an IT technician for Packard Bell.

PROBLEM

Lately, an argument has broken out between my brother and his best friend. My brother has found mistakes and miscalculations in the ‘records book’ and openly accuses his best friend of stealing money. This angers his friend and an argument begins. They both argue that they want to spend less time on the ice cream business and more on their part-time job I decide that this argument needs to be resolved quickly so I invite my brother and his friend to my house for a meeting.  I tell them that the problem has arisen because their current method of recording data is not very suitable and is the cause of the argument. I argue that this current argument is not the first and there have been many and all have been because of this method being unsuitable. My arguments for them to change their current method of using the ‘records book’ to keep data, are: its time consuming and time is money. Doing things like writing down all the information about ice cream sales, drawing out tables and doing calculations in their heads all take a lot of time. This time could be used to sell ice cream, which means time and money, is being wasted. Calculations are one of the main time consumers. My brother and his friend are good at maths and do all calculations in their head, so this takes quite a bit of time to do as there are so many calculations to do. Another problem that arises out of them doing calculations in their heads is that its not very convenient and errors can be easily made. It is imperative that calculations are precise because one small miscalculation can disrupt all the calculations and business. For example, if they were trying to work out the mode of ice creams sold (the most popular ice creams), if a mistake was made then the wrong amount of stock would be bought after looking at those calculations. So a large number of unpopular ice creams could be bought and then wasted because no one buys them and business could be lost because they have run out of the popular ice creams. Considering that they are also rushing and taking down all business detail and recording transactions while selling means that the chance of doing miscalculations is high. Another problem is the difficulty to read handwriting, or any shorthand or symbols, which my brother or his friend has used. Normally, my brother and his friend have neat handwriting but when they are in a rush, which is quite often they have to scribble things down and use symbols or shorthand. This also is a factor, which creates miscalculations and confusion because my brother and his friend are often left trying to figure out what they have wrote down afterwards. I also argue that the current method is not very ideal or professional and has no backup system, so if anything happens to the book, which can be easily damaged and easy to lose or misplace, the whole business will be disrupted and may have to stop running for a while. So taking these reasons into account I encourage them both to think of a new method of recording data.  

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POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

Lately, I have bought my brother a laptop computer, as a birthday present and he has not been using it very much, so I suggest the use of an IT solution to help them out. But my brother’s friend is quite old-fashioned and is not very familiar with today’s modern IT systems and encourages us to think of a manual solution before considering an IT solution. So we start making suggestions on how to improve or to make a new method of recording loans.

The first suggestion is that the current method should still be ...

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