Background
Fabrikam, Inc. manufactures and sells kites on a
hole sale basis to more than 5,000 customers. Currently, the company maintains
a static Web site and receives customer orders by telephone. It obtains raw
materials from two vendors.
The company contracts you to design and develop a solution by using the
Microsoft .NET Framework that will enable customers to place orders over the
Internet. The solution will include a new customer Web site. Testing and
deployment of the site must be complete in six months.
Existing
IT Environment
Fabrikam, Inc. has a private VPN. Salespeople use
VPN to access e-mail and file shares when they travel.
The company uses an accounting application to manage the customer billing
process. The accounting application runs on a mainframe computer. This
application accepts connections over TCP/IP and it uses its own binary
communication protocol. It responds to requests slowly and supports a maximum
of two concurrent TCP/IP connections. It cannot store information about
shipping status.
The company will continue to use the accounting application.
Interviews
Users
Sales manager
Our salespeople need access to customer information
and order history when they are in the office and when they travel in the
field.
We categorize our customers by sales volume. We use three categories, in
ascending order of volume, they are Bronze, Silver or Gold. Customer in higher
categories pay lower prices. We currently store category pricing on paper. I
want to store category pricing as part of the new solution. I want also the
ability to change pricing every quarter. Each customer must be able to see only
its own pricing information. Customers must not learn that different pricing
categories exist.
Manufacturing Manager
I want a solution that tracks my raw material
inventory and helps me order raw materials.
Shipping Manager
We spend too much time handling customer telephone
calls. Customers often telephone to learn the shipping status of their orders.
Our staff needs to find each printed order and then report the shipping status
to the customer.
IT Department
IT Manager
I own this project and I will be working directly
with you. Eventually, I want to locate all our business process on the
Internet. However, our highest priority is to make our customers happy. Anything
makes our salespeople more efficient will make our customers happier.
One of our bigger customer requests is the ability to place orders at the end
of the month. Currently, we cannot fulfil that request because we do not have
enough staff to answer the telephones.
Customers also want better information about order status. They want to track
the stages of their orders and monitor shipping status. They want to be
notified by e-mail when an order ships. Currently customers do not receive any
notification, because we do not have enough staff to telephone them when orders
ship.
We invest a lot of money in building our brand. Whenever our customers have a
request that involves our company, I want them to be able to go to the Web site
of Fabrikam, Inc. to complete the request. Customers should not be redirected
to another site with another company’s branding for such requests. Our
competitors have very successful Web sites, so we must act quickly to ensure
that our Web site offers all appropriate functionality.
I manage a staff of four people. They all have experience with ASP, but no
experience with ASP.NET. I want at least two of my staff to participate in the
development project. My staff will maintain the new application after its
initial deployment.
We will host the application ourselves. We are upgrading our network to handle
the expected traffic. We want the Web site to be as easy as possible to
administer. During peak loads, we must be able to monitor how many customers in
each customer category are logged on to the site.
I do not want to modify our existing accounting application and I do not want
to add any applications to the mainframe computer.
In four months our shipping partner will begin using an XML Web service to
track shipments. We already have the documentation for the interfaces that our
partner will support.
Finance Department
Chief Financial Officer
This project is critical to our business. However,
we have only a limited amount of money to spend. We must ensure that the scope
of the project will maximize the benefit to our customers.
Business
Process
Customers place orders for Kites once a month.
After an order is placed, it cannot be changed. Each order is taken over
telephone by a salesperson. The salesperson immediately enters the order into
the accounting application by using a client computer. The order is then
printed and delivered in the shipping department. The shipping department
completes and ships the order from existing inventory. The order is the marked
as complete.
Many customers have standing orders. A standing order is a list of products
that the customer expects to need each month. Currently, the sales department
records standing orders on paper. Customers with standing orders sometimes
override their standing order by placing a monthly order
The accounting application does not store shipping information for an order.
When an order is placed, the accounting application considers the order
complete for billing purposes.