Benefits of Implementing Information System in the Outback Tours - Business Plan Example

Problem ment Outback Tours (OT) offers enlightening tours to the environmental, historical or cultural heritage locations. The company is working for the last seven years and now the company’s staff (employees) is increasing with the passage of time because their customers have grown and therefore, managing tours and customer bookings have become difficult. Currently, the company is managing manual records (hard copies) of departure, tours, and bookings. And it becomes time consuming and difficult to find particular records, as well as, there is bright chances of making mistakes by the staff of the company. Due to the reasons not only the staff of the company is frustrating but also the customers of the company are not happy with their bad performances. The customers have started complaining that they are not informed regarding the confirmation / cancellation of the bookings at the right time, as well as, they have to wait to get a response to their queries. Due to the facts, the company is losing customers day by day and this is a great problem for the existence of the company. Proposed Solution Keeping in view the problems of the OT Company, it is recommended that the company should implement an information system in order to resolve its problems as well as competing with its competitors. The information system would facilitate the company to store, update and retrieve one or more records regarding their customers, bookings, tours, payments and inventory instantly. The information system would provide an easy to use interface for storing one or more records of the customers and facilitate to make bookings of the customer. Once the bookings are made, the system would able to generate reminders for the customers to confirm the bookings by making the payments. The system would facilitate the staff to update the status of the bookings either confirm or cancel. Moreover, the complete implementation of the information system would also able to generate diverse reports for the management as well as for their customers. Hence, the major problems of the company can be resolved by implementing information system and satisfying their customers (Geossi, 2014). Benefits From the various benefits of implementing information system in the Outback Tours, some of the main benefits include: the enhanced productivity of the employees, easy management of huge records of the company, easy backup and search capabilities. Moreover, the information system would provide facilities of managing the inventory of the Outback Tours, as well as, facilitates to schedule the tours along with allocation of customers, drivers and tour guides. Over and above all, the implementation of the information system would resolve the current and future issues of not only the employees of the Outback Tours as well as the system would fulfill the requirements of the customers. As the employees would search the data of the customers in seconds, therefore, the customer can get updated information instantly. Moreover, the management of the Outback would be able to get diverse reports with the usage of the information system (Sylvan, 2014). System Scope In software engineering, a context diagram is used to define the scope of the project and shows the system boundaries (Lossaco and Castiglioni, 2009). Therefore, in order to specify the scope of the Outback Tour System, the following context diagram is drawn. As shown in the above diagram, there are five (5) main features of the system include: the employees can manage data, the customer can manage booking of the tours, the system facilitate to schedule the tours, and the system can interact with the banks to manage the financial records of the Outback Tour. Moreover, the system would have ability to generate diverse reports as per the requirements of the Outback Tour management to assess the needs of the business. The system would have features and capabilities of the storing and retrieving the inventory data of the Outback Tour Company. The above given context diagram is specifying the requirements of the company; moreover, the diagram also facilitates to identify the functional and non-functional requirements of the system. Use Case Model Diagram Use Case Glossary The table specifies a description of each use case, given the above use case model (Ambler, 2012). Use Case Name: Search Tours Brief Description: The use case specifies that the customer would be provided the facility to search various tours by giving diverse parameters include: the date, tour name and departure data. Primary Actor: Customer Use Case Name: Tour Booking Brief Description: After utilizing the search tours use case, the tour booking use case specifies that the customer can book the tour by providing requisite personal information and tour information. Primary Actor: Customer Use Case Name: Manage Bookings Brief Description: The use case specifies that the booking officer can manage the bookings i-e cancellation and confirmation based on the payment delivery. Primary Actor: Booking Officer Use Case Name: Cancel Booking Brief Description: Both the customer and booking officer would be provided a facility to cancel the booking made by the customer for a particular tour. Primary Actor: Customer and Booking Officer Use Case Name: Payment Brief Description: This use case would automatically be generated when the customer confirms the booking of tour by making the payments. The use case is accessed by the System for authentication of the credit card payment method. Once the payment is authorized, the booking confirmation card would be generated. Primary Actor: System Use Case Name: Payment Report Brief Description: The use case would be initiated by the System Admin to review and generates the reports on the tours confirmation / cancellation and payments. Primary Actor: System Admin Use Case Name: Content Management Brief Description: The use case would be initiated by the System Admin to add, delete, view and update the contents of the system after initiating this use case. Primary Actor: System Admin Entity Relationship Diagram Entity Relationship Diagram Description The above given entity relationship diagram (ERD) shows that there are a total of six (6) entities include: the client, employees, tours, bookings, accommodation list and departure. Each of these six (6) entities has its own attributes name, data type, description and relationship. Each of the entities has its own primary key, for instance, the ‘Client’ entity has a primary key named ‘clID’, similarly, the ‘Employees’ entity has ‘empID’, ‘Bookings’ entity has ‘bID’, ‘Tours’ entity has ‘tID’, ‘Accommodation List’ has ‘accID’ and the ‘Departure’ entity has a primary key named ‘dID’. The primary key of one entity is utilized to develop relationship with an attribute of the other (or even same) entity (as a foreign key). Therefore, keeping in view this fact, the ‘Client’ entity has a relationship of ‘many to one’ with another entity named ‘Employees’. Similarly, the ‘Booking’ entity develops relationship with many entities include: the ‘Client’, ‘Tours’, ‘Accommodation List’, and ‘Departure’. The data types of the attributes of the each entity are diverse; however, generally the data type of the primary key is ‘Number’. Similarly, the data type of the attributes name like ‘Name’, ‘Address’, ‘E-mail’, ‘Designation, ‘Description’ and ‘Status’ is ‘Varchar2’ (Text). Moreover, the data type of the attributes name like ‘DateofBirth’, ‘ReturnDate’ and ‘ConfirmDate’ is ‘Date’. And the data type of the remaining attributes name like ‘Price’ is ‘Money’. For instance, the attribute name ‘Designation’ may store the data like ‘Booking Officer’, ‘Manager’, ‘Driver’ and ‘Tour Guide’. Input Screen Reports Booking Details Bookings per Departure Accommodation Booking Status Bibliography Ambler, Stone. UML 2 Use Case Diagrams. 2012: http://www.agilemodeling.com/artifacts/useCaseDiagram.htm (Accessed May 10, 2014) Callan, Steve. Database Modeling Using Visio. 2005 http://www.databasejournal.com/features/oracle/article.php/3529531/Database-Modeling-Using-Visio.htm (Accessed May 10, 2014) Geossi, Leigh. Brief overview of Benefits and Challenges of the Information System. 2014 http://www.insidebusiness360.com/index.php/brief-overview-of-the-benefits-and-challenges-of-using-information-systems-15098/ (Accessed May 9, 2014) Lossaco, Villino and Castiglioni. The operational Context Diagram. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/architecture/library/ar-introocdv1/ (Accessed May 11, 2014) Sylvan, Roy. Tangible Benefits of Information System. 2014. http://smallbusiness.chron.com/tangible-benefits-information-systems-50155.html (Accessed May 9, 2014) Read More