The purpose of this lab is to demonstrate your ability to gather requirements as a part of software system selection.

Current Situation

• Acme manufacturing is located in Kansas City, MO
• Total employees – 200
  • 50 office employees, e.g. CEO, Sales, Finance/Accounting, HR, IT, Legal, Engineering
  • 150 employees in manufacturing
• Revenue – $50M annually
• Product
  • Specialty project used in construction
  • Weighs 4 ounces
  • Inventory held in 3 warehouses, east, mid-west, west
  • Product is $5/unit, the average sale is 20 units ($100)
  • Product sold via company website (credit cards) or telephone orders (purchase order)
  • Products are sold domestically in the US only (no international sales)
  • Discounts offered to loyal customers

Assignment

• The head of accounting and finance (CFO) wants a new accounting system for the company as everything is done today is manual
• Assume you are an IT business analyst and you work closely with the CFO and the Finance team. Also, assume that you already interviewed everyone in the CFO’s organization to collect requirements for the new accounting system.
• You are getting ready to review the requirements of the new system with the CFO
• In Microsoft Word, write 8 high-quality requirements in the form of bullets. You should feel free to make assumptions in your bullets to build the requirements. Also note that good requirements are often written as below, describing the current problem and the desired future state. For example:
  • Our current auditors are Ernst and Young. The current quarterly audit takes 2 days and the annual audit 1 week due to all of the manual processes we have in place. The new system needs to enable Acme to reduce quarterly audits to 4 hours and annual audits to 2 days.
• Here is a very good example of a requirement from a former student of ITM300
  • Our current manual entries for inventory provide no control of systems. They fail to provide real-time accurate inventory which has resulted in severely low stock in our warehouses at least once a month for a whole year. The new system needs to provide accurate real-time inventory for each warehouse. The system should also recognize high, medium, low, severely low inventory ranges with color identifiers. When a low range of inventory is recognized a reminder to warehouse production management should be sent. The reminders should be periodical until a medium inventory range is achieved by the warehouse. If a warehouse remains in a low or severely low inventory range for more than 3 weeks information must be sent to the CEO within 2 business days. The ranges for color identifiers are:
    • Green 100,000 units to 75,000 units.
    • Lime-Yellow 74,999 units to 30,000 units
    • Orange 29,000 units to 10,000 units
    • Red 9,999 units to 0 units