Systems Development and Design - Case Study Example

?Systems Development and Design Table of Contents Introduction 3 About Amazon.co.uk 3 Business Processes of Amazaon.co.uk 4 UML Use Case Diagram 8 UML Class Diagram 11 UML Sequence Diagram 13 Conclusion 15 References 16 Introduction Improvements in information technology (IT) have facilitated organisations to develop such systems that have in turn enhanced their business operations and managerial decision-making activities. IT has allowed new business models to be implemented with the aid of flexible mechanisms which permit organisations to reach out to potential customers, connect their systems with suppliers and to support international operations. The application of IT has also established opportunities for organisations to concentrate on core procedures and abilities without facing any interruptions in the marginal fields of business (Paul & et. al., 2010). Focusing on this aspect, the report analyses the business processes of Amazon.co.uk. The report also includes the application of Unified Modelling Language (UML) case diagrams as a part of business investigation of Amazon. About Amazon.co.uk Amazon is considered as one of the renowned e-commerce organisations, which deals in a variety consumer based products. It is one of the most popular online retail stores, which provides beauty products, apparels, jewels, foods and books among other stuffs. The key reason behind enormity of Amazon is its remarkable product range. Amazon makes every possible attempt in order to tailor the experience of customers. Amazon uses multi-level e-commerce tactics and allows everyone to sell different products by using its platform. Business Processes of Amazaon.co.uk Amazon.co.uk is capable of delivering orders directly to the consumers as it has a strong relationship with suppliers, publishers, producers and other business associates. Moreover, a considerable number of third party sellers also enable Amazon.co.uk to provide abundant product selections without enhancing the level of stock beyond optimal level. Customer orders are placed through the website of Amazon.co.uk and customers expect instantaneous delivery of products. The base of sales channel of Amazon.co.uk is front-end which serves as the core of the business process. Customers go through the website of Amazon, search different products and place orders. Amazon.co.uk is liable for maintaining every front-end customer relationships and back-end logistics. After placing an order, Amazon.co.uk agrees to use the best internal distribution centre for shipping the order to the customer. The organisation is liable for coordinating the fulfilment of customers’ order. When the products are obtained from internal distribution centres, Amazon picks up, parcels and distributes the order. When the products are obtained from drop shipper, the supplier parcels the item and delivers to the customers. This business process requires Amazon.co.uk to maintain an optimum level of stock for instantaneous selling (Chiles & Dau, 2005). The other aspect of Amazon.co.uk is ‘Syndicated Stores’ program which permits different third party organisations to sell products by using the website of Amazon. In such a system, Amazon.co.uk provides the services with respect to technology, inventory and logistics for maintaining proper customer relationships. In this system, customers go through other websites, browse for the products they prefer to purchase and then place the order. The orders are essentially placed on the inventory of Amazon.co.uk and the organisational system determines the transporter which would deliver the products to the customers on time. The fulfilment of the order process execution follows the similar process as the base business process of Amazon.co.uk (Chiles & Dau, 2005). Since Amazon.co.uk acquires different product lines from diverse suppliers and assembles them according to the requirements of customers, its business process comprises strong supply chain activities. Amazon.co.uk depends entirely on just-in-time management approach. It has several warehouses that certify improved services to the customers. The warehouses of Amazon.co.uk are particularly designed for online retailing and effective shipping. Amazon.co.uk uses the Customer Fulfilment Networking (CFN) system in its business process. This system empowers true dynamic commerce based activities that not only satisfy the customer demands, but also enable to create demand in a profitable manner. CFN system is a virtual cycle which is comprehended through the integration of customer relationship management applications with order fulfilment applications and intellectual and dynamic demand and supply management. The following figure will show the CFN business process of Amazon.co.uk: From the above figure, it can be observed that in the first phase, customers’ place their orders through using credit cards, the orders placed by customers go through the servers of Amazon.co.uk and then analysed for available stocks in the warehouse. In the third phase, the products ordered by the customers are shipped to the warehouses of Amazon.co.uk from different distributors. In the fourth phase, every product item is selected, packed and accumulated at the nearest warehouses. In the fifth phase, orders are delivered and shipped through several transportation services (Digital 4Sight Corp, 2000). Sourcing multiple products from different suppliers and assembling them according to customers’ orders and specifications involve strong logistics and supply chain performance. Amazon.co.uk has developed the front-end business processes through highly sophisticated XML based system. The business process of Amazon.co.uk involves one-to-one personalisation and cooperative filtering of information from Amazon’s individual Order Management System (OMS). Amazon’s business system performs in harmonisation with the Supply Chain Planning Optimisation (SCPO) and Decision Support System (DSS) in the back-end. These applications develop a virtuous cycle, generating lucrative demand and providing concurrent personalised purchasing experience for customers (Digital 4Sight Corp, 2000). The business process of Amazon.co.uk is described below. At first, the information about customers is gathered in order to form customer profile in the database of Amazon.co.uk. Furthermore, information is also gathered regarding the products customers are looking for and customers actually purchase. The information about purchasing is interrogated in terms of yield inventory for every product with proper address. This type of information is used in order to seduce customers for purchasing products. Furthermore, information from customer profile and historical purchasing patterns are excavated through applying collaborative filtering for delivering real-time suggestions to the right customers at the right time (Digital 4Sight Corp, 2000). The demand planner application of Amazon.co.uk uses the information of inventory turnover and purchasing in order to vigorously predict customers’ requirements and demands of products on a continuous basis. By incorporation of this application with the inventory management and distribution system, Amazon.co.uk certifies that it maintains optimal inventory level for its most frequent ordered products. Constant understanding of order and inventory information enables Amazon.co.uk to commit proper lead times for order fulfilment. Moreover, Amazon.co.uk has intelligent distribution, warehousing and transportation which ensure proper delivery of products (Digital 4Sight Corp, 2000). UML Use Case Diagram In order to analyse the business process of Amazon.co.uk, UML diagram has been used. The objective of UML is to create a stable and common design that can be used for developing and establishing software. UML case demonstrates a unit of functionality delivered by the Amazon business system. The key objective of UML case diagram is to assist the development team to visualise functional requirements of the business system of Amazon, comprising relationship of different performers (Bell, 2003). Following is the UML use case diagram for business process of Amazon.co.uk. From the above diagram, it can be observed that in the business process of Amazon.co.uk, customers use the website in order to make online shopping. The key use cases of Amazon’s business process are view products, online shopping and register. Besides, the other use cases are checkout, payment service and customer authentication among others. Customers use the ‘view products’ case in order to find out and observe their preferable products. This case is used as a part of making ‘online shopping’ case. On the other hand, registering case permits customers to register themselves on Amazon.co.uk and to make private sales. It is worth mentioning that checkout case is also a part of Amazon’s business process. View products case is extended by several options for customers. Such as in this case, customers are capable of finding products, looking for different product collections, observing the recommended products and adding products to the shopping cart. Customer authentication case is included in the business process of Amazon.co.uk. There are several functions such as viewing products and adding products to the wish-list that require customer authentication case. The checkout case of Amazon.co.uk is done through login page and Single Sign On (SSO) functions, requiring the involvement of an external service provider. Checkout case also comprises ‘payment service’ case which can be done through credit cards (Bell, 2003). UML Class Diagram UML class diagram demonstrates how different entities such as people and information associate with each other. In other words, UML class diagram demonstrates static structures of the business system of Amazon.co.uk. A class diagram shows application modules, which are the aspects of business that programmers typically deal with (Bell, 2003). Following is the UML class diagram for business processes of Amazo.co.uk. The above figure demonstrates UML class diagram for Amazon’s business process. In online business, there are several UML classes for Amazon.co.uk namely user, customer, shopping cart, order, product and payment among others. The user of the website can be at several states such as active user or new user and can be associated with shopping cart. In the business process of Amazon.co.uk, every customer has certain identity. Every customer must have one customer account with proper id and billing address. The customer account possesses shopping cart and product orders. The product orders are sorted and have proper id, name supplier information and quantity ordered. On the other hand, every order has information regarding status and delivery address among others. Furthermore, the product orders are associated with payment class. There are several payment methods customers can use in order to make purchase and each payment has certain specific ids, dates and amounts. The classes such as shopping cart, product, order and payment are associated with each other. UML Sequence Diagram UML sequence diagram demonstrates a comprehensive course of specific case or just a portion of specific case. They are almost self-explanatory in nature and show a correlation between different objects in their sequence at a detailed level. A particular sequence diagram possesses two dimensions, one is vertical dimension and the other one is horizontal dimension. The vertical dimension illustrates the sequence of messages during the time they occur. On the other hand, horizontal dimension demonstrates the different occurrences due to which the communications are conducted (Bell, 2003). Following is the UML sequence diagram for the business processes of Amazon.co.uk. The above diagram provides a sequence of processes which is involved in purchasing of products from Amazon.co.uk. From the above figure, it can be observed that online customers can search for products and they acquire information from the inventory database which is maintained by Amazon. After finding the proper product, customers are able to view product descriptions such as components, features and prices among other aspects. This information allows customers to make purchase decision. If the product description fulfils the requirements of customers then they can add the products to the shopping cart. This loop continues until customers gather all the preferable products from the website of Amazon.co.uk. After adding every preferable product to the shopping cart, customers’ can check-out from the website. Conclusion Amazon.co.uk provides several products to the customers and it utilises the business procedure in order to support different online operations. The business process of Amazon.co.uk has allowed the organisation to fulfil the customers’ orders effectively. It provides competitive advantage because Amazon.co.uk has more flexibility with respect to satisfying the customers’ requirements. Furthermore, strong information system of Amazon.co.uk assists the organisation to maintain an optimum level of inventory which in turn can reduce the expenses. Besides, Amazon.co.uk also delivers the online platform for third party so that customers can find out different products, even if they are not available in the stocks of the organisation. The business processes of Amazon.co.uk create a strong supply chain network, where the organisation receives much higher boundary in comparison with standard business processes. References Bell, D., 2003. UML Basics: An Introduction to the Unified Modelling Language. Rational Software. [Online] Available at: http://www.nyu.edu/classes/jcf/g22.2440-001_sp06/handouts/UMLBasics.pdf [Accessed August 08, 2013]. Chiles, C. R. & Dau, M. T., 2005. An Analysis of Current Supply Chain Best Practices in the Retail Industry with Case Studies of Wal-Mart and Amazon.com. Georgia Institute of Technology, pp. 2-188. Digital 4Sight Corp, 2000. Customer Fulfilment in the Digital Economy Amazon.com. E-tail Customer Fulfilment Networks Pioneer. [Online] Available at: http://www.andyde.com/amazon.pdf [Accessed August 08, 2013]. Paul, D. & et. al., 2010. Business Analysis. British Informatics Society Limited. Read More