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MindPlay Educational Toys is a regional, California based company that currently has stores in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego. The company produces their own line of educational toys and also sells other toys from other companies in their three stores.
MindPlay’s main customer base consists of parents and children interested in play that encourages learning. MindPlay has also recently created loyalty programs with teachers in the three cities and is actively looking for ways to foster relationships with local school districts and other learning institutions such as museums and zoos. The loyalty program is very basic and consists of a mailing list gathered from in-store information request cards. The CEO believes that there are many more marketing opportunities available but is not sure how to go about increasing their customer base beyond the three stores.
The production process for MindPlay and purchasing for all three stores is done out of the central office in San Diego. The production manager is responsible for soliciting bids for raw materials that are then shipped to a production facility in Fresno. The manager has had trouble managing production over the last few years as the economy in California has changed so quickly and predicting sales on the limited information available has become difficult. During some fiscal quarters, some stores have too much inventory of MindPlay’s products while other quarters, some stores are falling short of various games and toys. Adding to the manager’s difficulties is the oversight of ordering other products from other educational game and toy suppliers. The manager orders games and toys from sixteen different suppliers throughout the year for all three stores. Currently, the inventory is managed at the central warehouse, and the manager ships the same number of each product to each store at the beginning of every quarter. Because the inventory is controlled centrally, it is difficult to determine what inventory each store has on hand at any given moment. Most of the inventory reconciliation happens quarterly and requires managers at each store to manually take inventory at the conclusion of each quarter. As a result, the manager has noticed increased inventory loss and he also suspects that he is not managing the products in the most efficient manner. He would like a better idea of what product each store has on hand at any time and would like insight in how to better order products and materials for the production and inventory processes.
Currently, there is little communication between stores and the technology at both the stores and the central office is becoming outdated. Most communication with vendors and suppliers is occurring through email and purchase orders are being processed manually. The only connections currently between the locations are via Internet connections provided by a local ISP in each city. MindPlay’s CEO knows that they need to invest in infrastructure to solve some of the problems with the marketing, inventory and processing problems but is also interested in additional technology solutions. The CEO is interested in not only moving their inventory online, but she is also interested in opening stores in Chicago and Dallas. She believes the growing pains her company is already experiencing will be exacerbated by growth outside her region.
Based upon the narrative provided above complete the following deliverables using appropriate systems analysis and design tools and techniques. The focus is on the pertinent issues as they relate to the phases of planning (scope definition and problem analysis) and analysis (requirements analysis). Make assumptions where necessary and document in responses. Please cite any outside sources used which are used:
1. Create a high-level Data Flow Diagram (i.e., Event Diagram) of the proposed MindPlay system identifying necessary external agents, processes, data stores, and data flows (use standard symbols). Provide appropriate explanation of how and/or why you designed the Data Flow Diagram. Note: The Context Diagram and Use-Case Model Diagram from the Midterm exam may be used as references.
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2. Create a high-level Activity Diagram with swimlanes outlining the activities of the proposed system for MindPlay.
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3. Summarize, in your own words, the relevant issues related to the storing and tracking of inventory for MindPlay. This may take the form of a bulleted list.
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4. If MindPlay were to implement a relational database management system (DBMS) to manage its inventory describe the types of information they would need to store in the database. This should take the form of a high-level discussion in non-technical terms so that your client can understand. Remember, the CEO likely does not have an information systems background and will not necessarily understand the technical database terminology that you are familiar with. Discuss how storing this information would help to alleviate the issues identified in question 3.
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5. From the discussion in questions 3 and 4 (specifically the types of information to store) develop a list of the major entities needed in the management of the inventory and provide a brief description of each as well as related attributes. Additionally, provide a narrative discussing how these entities will relate to one another.
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6. From the discussion of entities, attributes, and relationships above, create a fully-attributed Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) to model the functional requirements of the MindPlay inventory database from a logical design perspective. Because your client’s background in database design is quite limited provide a detailed description and justification of the ERD you are proposing. This includes but is not limited to the choice of entities, attributes, primary and foreign keys, and cardinality. Create a second ERD from the physical design perspective by identifying appropriate data types for each attribute and including those in the model.
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