SIF8035 Informasjonssystemer grunnkurs CASE: Play Ball! 1 PlayBall! is in specialty retail catalog sales. PlayBall! s specialty is serving customers whose primary interests are sports, both as collectors and players. To support its sales, PlayBall! stocks an inventory of specialty books, videos, equipment, and clothing for the sports of baseball, basketball, football, and golf. PlayBall! s sales are characterized by high-volume transactions, which range from very low to very high-cost. Because each sales transaction affects inventory, inventory updates are frequent. The competitive nature of the specialty retail catalog sales business makes customer satisfaction a particularly high-priority item. Therefore, rapid shipment and efficient management of back order and return transactions are a major business focus. PlayBall! needs on-demand and detailed reporting capability to establish sales and product composition trends and to manage inventory effectively. Their current system is file-based and needs to be completely revamped. In order to find the best solution possible, PlayBall! has created multiple teams within its Information Systems group and asked each team to come up with a database-based approach to their business. The team with the best solution is likely to be well rewarded. Of course, good design must be accompanied by great documentation and a fantastic implementation! PlayBall! s Company Objectives The company s stated objectives are: 1. To maintain sustainable sales growth. This objective requires designing PlayBall! operations to foster customer loyalty and to attract new customers by: a. Maintaining an inventory of products that meet customer needs. b. Maintaining and improving order response time. c. Delivering order products quickly and efficiently. d. Maintaining customer contact through follow-up actions. e. Maintaining price competitiveness through operational cost control (Lower costs can be passed on to the customer in terms of lower prices without sacrificing target profit margins). 1 Adapted from Rob, P. and Semaan, E. Chapter 3: The POS Database Design Process, in Databases: Design, Development, & Deployment Using Microsoft Access, Irwin McGraw-Hill, New York, 2000, pp. 69-100.
2. To maximize net sales returns by maintaining and improving cost controls through: a. Efficient data access and data-to-information transformation to improve inventory management. b. The customer order process c. The vendor order process. d. The shipping process. e. The back-order process. f. The product return process. The Current Environment PlayBall! currently has over 48,000 customers. This number represents a 12% growth since 1999. The customer base is expected to grow at a rate of about 10% per year during the next two years. PlayBall! keeps track of many customer characteristics, including name, address, and phone number. As of March 2000, the PlayBall! company maintained an inventory of over 1000 products, including book titles, video titles, sporting equipment, and clothing. The number of products has grown 18% since 1998 and is expected to grow at an annual rate of 14% during the next two years. Daily sales transactions have grown from an average of 1200 per day to 1900 per day. PlayBall! s customers include people who have purchased PlayBall! products, those who have called in the past to make product inquiries, and those whose names and addresses have been purchased from commercial lists of hobby magazine subscribers. PlayBall! hopes to eventually expand their customer base to include other retail stores. But, these plans are a long way off. When customers order products that are not available or are available in quantities less than desired by the customers, PlayBall! places them a back order for these products. Careful inventory control has kept back orders within reasonable limits. One of PlayBall! s goals is to decrease back orders even more. Additionally, customers are allowed to return defective products or products that do not conform to their expectations. PlayBall! wants to minimize the number of returns by reducing defects and being sure to accurately portray their products to consumers. Most stock replacement orders are processed on a weekly basis, based on each product s minimum quantity-on-hand requirements. However, back-order requirements are handled on a daily basis to reflect PlayBall! s interest in maintaining and improving order response time and delivering products quickly and efficiently. Regardless of the reason for the product orders, such orders are all bundled by vendor to avoid unnecessary ordering sequences. PlayBall! has worked very hard to establish and sustain good relationships with their vendors.
PlayBall! s current operations The following sequence represents a typical order processing/invoicing event: 1. A customer calls to place an order 2. A seller responds to the call and initiates the invoicing process by opening the invoice form. A number of options are possible, depending on whether or not the customer has placed an order before, knows their customer number, and/or has a current product catalog. Obviously, if they are not current customers, the seller needs to obtain and enter the customer data, and assign a customer number. If the customer does not know his/her number, the seller will need to look it up. If the customer does not know the product number, the seller will need to obtain the product class, type, category, title, or some combination of these to identify the appropriate product number. 3. When the desired product has been identified, the seller enters the product code, verifies the product description and price, and enters the number of units. If the product is not in stock, the seller asks the customer if the product may be back ordered. If the customer accepts the back order, a back order for the product is generated. If the product is in stock but below the customer order quantity, the seller asks whether the customer will accept the currently available quantity and accept a back order of the balance. The answers to these two questions determine whither a back order is generated. Assuming that the product was in stock or has been back ordered, the seller action sequence completes a single invoice line. Each completed invoice line adjusts the product inventory. The seller then asks for the next product order and repeats the invoice line process. This is repeated until the order is complete. 4. When all order lines are completed, the seller asks the customer what shipment mode is desired and informs the customer of the shipping charge. 5. The seller verifies the product orders and gives the customer each order line subtotal, the order subtotal, the shipping charges, the tax amount, and the order total. If the customer wishes to change any invoice item, the seller makes the required changes and repeats the verification process. 6. If step 5 has successfully completed, the seller verifies the customer s shipping address and makes whatever shipping address changes are appropriate to ensure that the order is delivered properly. 7. If step 6 has been successfully completed, the seller transmits the invoice to the shipping department. This action automatically generates the shipping label. A shipping department clerk uses the invoice lines to pull the products from inventory, boxes the products, places the shipping label on the box, seals the box, and places the box in the appropriate shipping container for transport to the customer. 8. Daily reports are prepared each night that include a list of the customers who have ordered today, the products that were ordered, and the backorders that were submitted to vendors.
Current Issues that Need to be Addressed The current configuration at PlayBall! poses a number of problems that Pat Massey is hoping you can fix. Problem 1 If the customer does not have access to the current sales catalog and does not know the product code, product information is difficult to track. Because the application software is not able to provide detailed search information, the seller does too much time-consuming manual searching and often fails to find the product data in time to complete the sale. Customer callbacks are frequent and costly, especially in terms of lost time. Problem 2 If a customer purchase is tax exempt, the customer s tax status must be entered and verified with each purchase. This process is time-consume and is subject to evaluation error. Problem 3 After the applicable state sales taxes have been collected, the current system requires state sales tax collection summaries to be generated periodically. The summaries are then used to write manual checks. The state internal revenue service addresses are stored in a separate file that generates the mailing labels. This approach requires three different actions, several of which are manual. Not surprisingly, the system has led to errors and omissions. Problem 4 The PlayBall! sales manager cannot track the sales performance of individual sellers. In addition, if there are complaints about an invoice or a shipping problem, PlayBall! has no way to determine which employee wrote the invoice or the shipping release. Problem 5 Currently, there is no way to track vendor quality. PlayBall! would like to have a mechanism for assessing vendor quality in terms of response time, numbers of defects, backorders, etc. We re not sure how to do this if it should be a report or collected in the data somehow. But, this is essential as we move toward improving customer relationships. Problem 6 Along the lines of improving customer relationships, PlayBall! needs to have a way of evaluating customers. Things like dollar-value of orders and number of returns could be used to assess the customer quality. We want to reward our best customers by potentially offering them discounts or some other means of keeping them loyal to PlayBall! Problem 7 This is not a problem as much as it is a concern. While the current configuration of data is not optimal, we are able to generate a number of reports. As such, it is important that we are still able to prepare reports that accurately reflect monthly, quarterly, and annual activity. These should include inventory summary reports, inventory detail reports, and sales & commission reports. Samples of these reports are included. Additionally, other reports are run, such as employee phone numbers, back-order report, defective products, etc.
Querying Capability PlayBall! wants to make sure that (at a minimum) the following queries can be run easily: 1. How many invoices were written by each employee in a given month? 2. Which employee sold the most in a given month? 3. Which products are ordered the most/least often? 4. Which products were backordered for more than a specified number of orders (or the most in a given month)? 5. Which products were defective for more than a specified number of orders (or the most in a given month)? 6. For each product class and type combination, we need to know how many products were ordered. 7. To whom should we give most favored vendor status? 8. Which are our best customers? 9. Which employees have birthdays this month? (Pat Massey is a big fan of birthdays and likes to send cards commemorating the event). Pat Massey and her staff are very happy to work with each team as they move forward. After reading this request, and learning a bit more about your employer, you are likely to have questions. Please prepare a list of questions to ask Pat or anyone else at PlayBall! It is very important for you to be sure you understand the requirements and are able to capture them accurately. Feel free to offer suggestions that come from your knowledge of other specialty retail companies. There might be some interesting ideas on Web that could help us have a database that supports our operational goals, and helps us to build quality relationships with our customers and vendors.
Sample Reports: 1. Inventory summary report Product Class Product Type Product Category Products Units Book/Cards Baseball Player 78 785 Collector 183 2483 Basketball Player 28 158 Collector 45 87 Football Player 18 56 Collector 35 42 Golf Player 87 548 Collector 15 32 Equipment Baseball Player 576 4805 (report continues in essentially the format) Collector 76 126 2. Inventory Detail Report Product Class Unit Price Derek Jeter Rookie Card Titanium Cobra Driver, QOH QOO QBO Book/Card $45.00 2 1 0 Equipment $325.00 8 10 2 NY Yankees Jersey Clothing $45.00 2 32 30 2000 World Series Video Video $29.99 48 2 0 (report continues listing all products in inventory flagging those that are backordered)
3. Sales and Commissions Report Employee Invoice # Invoice (Sales) Date Sales Amount Commissio n Jeff Hoffer 785 August 6, 2001 $126.95 $3.17 987 August 10, 2001 $286.83 $7.17 1105 August 13, 2001 $39.90 $1.00 1112 August 17, 2001 $282.90 $7.07 1132 August 22, 2001 $6.70 $.17 1135 August 22, 2001 $16.95 $.42 Sub total $760.23 $19.01 Mary Prescott 1122 August 20, 2001 $110.00 $2.75 1128 August 21, 2001 $94.90 $2.37 1133 August 22, 2001 $79.25 $1.98 Sub total $284.15 $7.10 (report continues in essentially the same format for all sales employees)
PlayBall! Company Organizational Hierarchy PlayBall! Company September 13, 2001 General Manager Pat Massey Info Systems Manager Brian Dennis Sales Director Lee Connelly Gen. Services Manager Lynn Setser Chief Accountant Laureen Hopkins Technical Support Design/ Development teams Sellers Shipping Supervisor General Support Accountants Shipping Personnel