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Project Overview
Project Background
The name of the business is Systemized Electronics pit shop; it has its head office in Abu Dhabi. Systemized Electronic Pit Shop is one of the newest electronic retailers in emirates of Abu Dhabi, which was established 2 years ago and recently the business has managed to expand into four branches in Abu Dhabi and single branch Al Ain.
Current Status
The inventory and reports is handled by the employees manually through various communication channels, for example: by phone, invoices, delivery notes, or physical counts. This method is not efficient, time consuming and requires physical efforts, so most of the time there are many mistakes, risk on loosing customer by providing them with wrong information or delivering entirely different product to them is very high. The nature of the current information management system is paper based.
Project Purpose
An increase in the scale of business operations requires an effective information management strategy. The current paper based system could not support the scale of operations for the shop. This implies that a new strategy had to be implemented towards the management of information. This project was driven by a number of factors such as:
- Improper billing: the bill was filled by the employees by hand and there were many mistakes on it(amount is not filled clearly, type, name of product is not filled on the invoice
- Communication between the branches to book any items if requested by other branches
- Product availability
Project Sponsor
The Systemized Electronics pit shop owner is the sponsor for this project. The end users of the proposed Fujitsu GlobalSTORE Point of Sale will be the employees at the shop. Generally, the following are the users of the proposed POS system:
- The employees at the various locations
- The shop owner, who is the sponsor
- Mangers, supervisor of the shop, they are allowed to access the system and generate reports either on a weekly or a monthly basis.
Project Location
The location of the project will be the various locations for the branches of the shop. The major project meetings will be held at the head office.
Project Duration
The project is scheduled for seven months, starting from 1st March 2011 till 30th September 2011.
Project Team
Project Scope Management
Current Situation at the Systemized Electronic Pit Shop
The current information and transaction processing systems at the Systemized Electronic Pit shop are paper based; this means that any transaction is recorded manually on paper. Presently, the inventory and the reporting is manually done the employees of the shop through the use of avenues such as telephone, written invoices, delivery notes and in some cases, physical counts that may go unaccounted for.
With the increasing customer base and the expansion strategy, these approaches to information management and transaction processing are proving inefficient and unreliable due to increasing errors in reporting and transaction processing (Cleland & Gareis, 2006). The manual paper based approach is time consuming, and in the long run affects the service delivery to the clients, therefore posing a potential loss of the clients.
With the current manual paper based system, access to information is limited, for instance, the employees can not access various products information in cases of inquiries by the clients, and the clients too have no access to the shops basic information such as location, and the list of available products and their respective prices (Ireland, 2006).
The communication between the various branches of the shop is also inefficient since they rely on the use of the telephone. This implies that in case of any transfer of goods among the branches, there is a probability that they may not be accounted for at the branch level.
Quantity tracking is also done through manual compilation of the reports from the various branches of the shop; this is prone to errors due to late submission of the reports by the respective branch managers. The billing system is also paper based, hence increasing chances of fraud and unaccountability in cases of receipt losses.
Projects Goals
One of the main goals behind the implementation of the Fujitsu GlobalSTORE Point of Sale (POS) terminal at the Systemized Electronic Pit shop is to increase employee productivity; the implementation of POS will enhance employee productivity since majority of their tasks will be made easy compared to the present paper based system.
Another goal of the POS project is to increase customer satisfaction; increased employee productivity guarantees increased customer satisfaction. The POS implementation will also increase the revenues for the Systemized Electronic Pit shop; an efficient information management and transaction processing systems is a guarantee towards an increase in revenues for the shop.
Another significant goal of the project will be to increase the market share; having an easy access to information about the shop is a guarantee towards increasing its customer base; this in turn increases its market share. The POS project will also serve to provide efficient and reliable management of information and transaction processing systems, enhance efficient communication between the various branches of the shop, and to increase its competitive advantage over other prospective competitors.
Included Functionalities of the Proposed Fujitsu GlobalSTORE Point of Sale Terminal
The implemented POS at systemized Electronic pit shop will be able to generate Inventory reports and offer customer information management; which will be used for marketing purposes, management of the receivables and buying analysis of the customers. Another included functionality will be history tracking of the customer purchases, Barcode reading devices and Touch Screen input; which supports both barcode tag printing and other hand held devices which can be used for ordering and receiving.
The POS system at the shop will be capable of interlinking of the various franchises of the Systemized Electronic Pit shop, which facilitates quantity tracking in the various branches at the different locations.
It will also have Credit card reading capabilities and cash back services for selected banks, Receipt printers, card swipe capabilities and an integrated system that will be used for the processing of credit cards, storage of sales information which will be used for reporting, evaluation of the sales trends and profit analysis, and an accounting interface that will be used to feed the relevant information concerning the sales and cost of sales to the selected accounting application softwares.
The POS software will also have promotional sales features, the capability to handle foreign currencies and multiple payments.
The Excluded Functionalities of the Proposed Fujitsu GlobalSTORE Point of Sale System
The implemented POS will exclude the actual accounting applications, features such as customer loyalty programs will not implemented in the design. Signature capture devices, client pin pad devices and weight scale will be excluded during the implementation of the proposed POS terminal.
The external entities that will interact with the POS system will include: the products database, the employee database, the customer database, the developers of the POS software. The relationship will be mostly to query and update the databases. The POS developers are responsible for maintenance of the POS system.
The management of the shop will be able to receive inventory reports from the POS system. The accounting application will be able to get values such as the total sales and cost of sale in order to perform the various accounting analysis procedures. The Receipt printer on the other hand basically prints the total sales per customer, and any required amounts such as VAT. The tax register will be fed with the total amount of the tax that resulted from the sales at the shop.
Project Time Management
Work Breakdown Structure
The Work Breakdown structure will be used to divide the overall project into smaller manageable units that will be assigned to the project team members (Ireland, 2006). The major project tasks are outlined below:
- Change request from the Systemized Electronic Pit shop
- Analysis of the business needs and requirements; this will be performed by analysts.
- Project initiation
- Project planning and project design
- Execution of the project
- Closure of the project
- Development of project control parameters that will be used to evaluate the overall efficiency of the system over time.
The Project Team
The project team will basically consist of six members; each having a designated duty during the various phases of the project development. The allotted salary amount for the project team members will total to approximately 80000 AED, for the whole project with respect to the allocated time frame for project completion.
Some duties could be allocated more than one person depending on the urgency and technicality. Some members will also be assigned more than one duty during the project development phase so as to avoid cases of scope creep. The implementation of the POS system will take seven months to complete.
The detailed project phases and their respective durations are outlined in the following table.
The table below indicates the task precedence.
Key Milestones of the Project
Milestones are used during the project scheduling so as to facilitate the process of project management and to evaluate whether the project is still on schedule as planned. Milestones are mostly constrained with reference to dates so that the project management team can evaluate schedule intervals which are critical for the success of the entire project. (Phillips, 2003) This is achieved through the calculation of the slack of each interval between the selected project tasks.
Segmentation of this kind can be used to reveal cases of schedule problems during the early stages of the project development. In particular in milestones are used to monitor effectiveness and to monitor the progress of project development. The key milestones during the implementation of the Point of Sale system at the Systemized Electronic pit shop will include:
- The acceptance of the change request.
- The acquisition of the required hardware and software within the required time.
- Development of the logical and physical design of the proposed Point of Sale systems for the Systemized Electronic Pit shop.
- The overall completion of the implementation phase.
The methodology that will be combined with the project scheduling to evaluate the continual success of the project will be the Critical Path Method (CPM). This approach will be effective since it entails a critical analysis of:
- All the activities that are required to run the project to completion.
- The allocated time frames for the completion of the various project activities.
- The dependencies between the various project tasks.
Resources
The implementation of the Fujitsu GlobalSTORE Point of Sale system at the Systemized Electronic pit shop is bound to consume resources which are categorically divided into:
- Human resources; includes the human labor that is required for the implementation of the project.
- Physical resources; includes both the hardware and the software requirements.
Human Resources
This basically involves the project team members. The project team members are six in total and each member will be assigned a specific task according to his specialization. The project team will comprise of the following:
Physical Resources
This is primarily divided into two categories; software and hardware requirements.
The hardware requirements for the implementation of the proposed POS terminals are outlined below:
- Workstation servers.
- Personal computers.
- Barcode readers.
- Credit card readers.
- Networking equipment, which will include switches, Ethernet cables.
- Receipt printers.
- Cash drawers.
The software requirements that are necessary for the completion of the project will include:
- Microsoft Windows XP and the required licenses.
- The POS application and the respective store licenses.
- Any other necessary documentation.
Project Cost Management
The detailed cost requirements for the project are outlined in the following table.
In addition, there are approximately 80000 AED for human resources that will be deployed towards the completion of the project.
The total cost therefore = 80000+60600= 140600 AED
Project Risk Management
In the implementation of any project, there are usually associated risk factors. Our POS project is not an exception. One of significant risk factor is in terms of financial factors. Insufficient funds which may result to incompletion and the lack of proper maintenance in case the project is implemented successfully and High overhead costs associated with the maintenance of POS systems.
Another risk factor is in terms of technical risk factors, this basically includes lack of technical expertise required to maintain the POS system during the course of its usage, lack of sufficient training of the Systemized electronic shop staff towards the usage of the implemented POS system and technical difficulties associated with the implementation of a POS system.
The organizational culture and politics is also a potential risk factor; this will be determined by the commitment of the top level management and lack of the staff’s interest in the use of the proposed Point Of Sale system.
The low level risks are risks whose probability of occurring are minimal and usually have minimal impacts on the success of the project; low probability-low impacts which can be ignored. Low level risks in the POS project are financial the organizational culture and politics risks; probability of it occurring is minimal since it was the idea of the shop to improve their current information and inventory system.
Low impact- high probability risks are found at the top left corner of the chart, they are of minimal importance though their chances of occurring should be reduced greatly.
High Impact low probability risks are found at the bottom right of the probability chart, they are unlikely to happen, and if they happen they can greatly affect the success of the project. One is risk in the POS project is the technical risk factor. High impact high probability risks are critical. They are most likely to occur and have high impact on the project. One such risk is the financial risk factors.
Benefits of the Implementation of Fujitsu GlobalSTORE POS Systems
The tangible benefits to the business include:
- Increased revenue and hence increased profitability of the business.
- Reduction in the overhead expenses that were due to the use of the paper based system.
The intangible benefits to the business include:
- Increased customer satisfaction.
- Increased employee productivity.
- Increased market share.
- Increased competitive advantage over other competitors
- Reduction of management related problems.
Project Implementation
Prototype Design
The prototype will be used to evaluate the functionality of the proposed POS system and explore possible alternatives that could also be included in the proposed POS system.
The prototype strategy that will be used will be based on the Application simulation software because of its capability to allow both the non technical and the technical users of the system to experiment the proposed POS system. The prototype will be used to evaluate whether the user requirements have been met by the proposed Fujitsu GlobalSTORE Point of Sale system.
Test Strategy
A test strategy is basically used to inform the project team of the issues that arise during the testing phase of the project development (Phillips, 2003). The test strategy basically entails the testing objective, approaches that used to test the new functions, the total project development time, the total value of the resources that are required for completion of the project and the environment under which the system is tested. The test strategy that will be deployed will include all the three approaches: unit, integration and system testing.
System Manual and Supporting Technical Documentation
The required system documentation will be included in the POS application software. A technical documentation for the network design will also provided at the end of the project development and implementation.
References
Cleland, D., & Gareis, R. (2006). Global project management handbook. New York: McGraw-Hill Professional.
Ireland, L. (2006). Project Management. New York: John Wiley.
Phillips, J. (2003). MP Project Management Professional Study Guide. New York: McGraw-Hill Professional.
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