System Design for a Web-Based System - Assignment Example

Running head: Motorsport Ltd. Your name: Course name: Professors’ name: Date System design for a web-based system Motorsport have the urge and the neeed to design an online system which they will use to sell the motor-vehicle parts. There is the need to deasign the system so that all the scenarios are captured. This section will cover the requirements for the new system. Motorsport has suppliers whch are located in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Hertfordshire. They are to communicate so that the stock are managed online. Technology used and why The Internet has been known to provide the best and most effective platform for marketing both local and international car spare parts. It is the most economical, to say the least. However, there is more than meets the eye with online commerce. There are many parameters that should be considered before one engages in online commerce. The Internet is complex and also dynamic market platform that requires regular and daily training. Online marketing is far much different from the world of print, broadcast, and out-of-home advertising markets. The Internet is so vast and is evolving at very high-rates such that it is becoming hard to properly target the audiences which are intended. Websites are the primary tools that are used by companies to market services online. There is therefore a dire need to make sure that the website that is being marketed meets the aim they were meant to achieve. Risks involved One risk that is clear is that of system failure and thus services not being offered. This phenomenon is normally referred to as denial-of-service attacks. This will be experienced when the network use will be intense. What this will mean for the charity organization is that they will lose some sales because of system failure. The whole system, will be down if this happens. The assumption that is made here is that it will be hard to move to offline way of doing business as Motorsport Ltd. will have shifted to online business fully. There will be no time to revert to the old ways of doing business. To avoid great losses, Motorsport Ltd. should make sure that the systems are working and during peak seasons, they should make sure that the system is optimal. Security is one of the issues that come up with online stock control there are many hackers and fraudsters that are on the loose. Since the introduction of the Internet, there have been many incidences of attacks. With Motorsports Ltd. opting to go online in stock transactions, they will not be an exception. They will have to put up with the fact that they are prone to Internet attacks. The organization in question, Motorsport Ltd., use smart cards in their payments; this is riskier and their payment systems might be hacked into. Most hackers are looking for credit card information so that they can use to purchase items and pay bills. Physical attacks are also a possibility with online systems. Computer hardware and software are very expensive and thieves will want to break into systems and steal these valuables. If there is an attack on the system due to thieves breaking into the system, then the system will fail. Shifting to online systems will mean that the system that is being used be maintained. This is a requirement that online systems should meet in order to be optimal. The risk here is that the staff who are working here are not privy to these updates and maintenance. The website will also need to be updated on a daily basis so that it has the latest features that are required for e-commerce sites. Updating the website will ensure that it integrates well with the online e-commerce system. This process may lead to nasty experiences as it has been found out in most cases. Most of the updates are not well developed and they are rushed when they are being suggested by the web developers. The e-commerce platform is still a new phenomenon in the world and it has not been properly developed. Staff also form another significant risk to the management. This is so because the management will have to deal with having to convince other staff to go home. This is risky because if the system will fail after some time, it will be hard to get back the former experienced staff. They will be alienated. This is so, if the option is to revert to the old way of doing things. With the introduction of new system, some staff will have to be relieved of their duties. Staff, unlike information system tends to be predictable. There are no instances of them failing unless they are on strike. This is also predictable and prior measures can be sought before then. Human beings can be talked into understanding the situations prevailing in an organization unlike now when people are reliable in the workflow. People can be talked to; they can be convinced into doing something. Systems do not reason like humans (Mahmood, 2000). Managing the stock has been way easier with the manual system. With e-commerce, it will be hard for the children charity organization to manage the circulation cycle of the items. An example is what will happen if many people ask for the goods and there is no stock in store? This will mean that the organization will lose trust of their clients and thus lose money. It is hard turning down customers because there is no stock to be sold. It is hard to manage the cycle of available stock and new customer requests (Arinze, & Anandarajan, 2003). Marketing The marketing process of Motorsport Ltd. will be simplified. The company will have to set up an online store and an online process system which will be used to market the spare parts. One of the Internet strategies that this company will have to put in place will be the selling of spare parts on their website which the clients can have access at. Although this strategy is not yet at par with other companies in the same business, it is one of the fastest products of the company and is gaining popularity. There will be need to have online promotions where the company has been giving away free products t companies with more purchases as an initiative to attract more online clients. All these strategies will help make sales increase tremendously. In addition to this, the candles company will have to outsource contact center services which will provide marketers with general information like sales, inquiries, and assistance for customer service throughout the day in a very efficient manner. Motorsports Ltd. will have also have to partner with various similar product industries get efficient marketing. This was effectively incorporated into their website as one of the many conveniences of clients looking for candle products. Operations The success of Motorsports Ltd. will be attributed to the integration of e-commerce features in its website so that they are able to sell their items over the Internet. There will be need to introduce the e-commerce that will enable the operations of the spare parts. The use of information systems will be easier because customers will be able to save time given that they will get the candles by ordering online and not having to go around looking for the candles. The shopping process will be simplified with the use of this online information system; it will not try to bring about a new shopping process. It will make the normal shopping process to be simple and efficient. What is more, the new system will be very familiar to the people. System design In brief, a system to be developed has to allow online checking of stock, ordering and delivery arrangements. The tools below are representations of the new system design are shown below: Class diagram 0..* manages stock 0..* 1..* checks 0..* 1..* serves 1..* available parts 1..* places an order 0..* 1..* ordered part(s) delivered 1..* System architecture for the new system Flow chart diagram The customer visits the website where there is interface of interaction between the system and the customer. The customer checks whether the parts are available or not. If they are available the customer simply place an order, if not then he/she may quit the system. After successful placement of order, the customer and the company arranges for delivery of the orders then quits the system Information flow in the new system The customer checks for a particular item from online inventory of Motorsport Limited. If available, the customer can place an order and an ordered item is recorded in the online list of ordered items. The ordered item is due for delivery after the payment and the delivery is checked against the delivery document and recorded in delivered items. DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN Motorsport Limited is a company which is located in the UK and has four local retail stores and warehouses. Motorsport Limited has heavy reliance on information systems and information technology. As a requirement for most modern organizations, there is the need to have a strategy that will be used to recover the systems and the operation procedures in situations where there will be disasters. The disasters will range from mild ones to critical ones. Motorsport Limited should be ready to deal with the disasters so that they will maintain a good name in the region. Having a good reputation is paramount to the business and how clients perceive them (Monson-Haefel, 2000). Key business areas which must be kept Customer relations: The RTO that will be allocated in the customer relations department is four hours and RPO of one day. The reason for this allocation is that the clients and the stakeholders will have to be informed with what is happening with the company. It is therefore very important that this department comes back to action the soonest so that they keep on informing the clients of whatever is happening. The RTO of five immediate RTO will be approved given the urgency and the criticality of the tasks that take place here. The tasks that take place in this department include: Taking calls from clients enquiring of the various programs offered, printing brochures that will be used by potential clients, loading the phones that are used in the organization with the required credit, taking the directions from senior managers about on various issues like following up on prospective clients, making sure that the good image of the organization is maintained, linking the various heads of departments so that there is coherent information flow in these departments. Customer phone contact: four hours for the RTO will be requested and expected to be approved. The reason for this is that the department handles the contacts of the clients. All current, past and potential customers will leave their contacts in Motorsport. The main reason for this is that the company policy is that all the customers should be reachable whether they are past customers or potential. Their contacts are very important to the growth of the organization. The marketing department will have to liaise with the customer contact department to ensure that this is the case. The phone contacts of the customers are very important, should be, and should be kept as safe as possible. The use of information system has been made possible at the department and the contacts of the customers are updated frequently. The tasks of the department include: updating the customer contacts database regularly, following up with the marketing department to ensure that new customers are added to the database, following up with the customers to ensure that they are reachable at all times, making sure that the customers are well versed with any new developments in the organizations. Utilization department: The department requested and got four hours of RTO approved. An RPO of one day. The department is concerned with ensuring that all the resources are utilized and made use of appropriately. It is at this time that the utilization department will need to make optimal use of resources to ensure that the organization comes back to normal after the disaster. The tasks of the department include making inventory of all the resources in the organization, assigning the resources the tasks and the requirements of each department, making sure that they are fully utilized to ensure efficient resource management. The department will have more work during and after the disaster because of the fact that the resources, which are engaged for the work and the tasks, will have to be fully utilized (Arinze, & Anandarajan, 2003). Policies and procedures for the contingency Recovery strategy chosen The strategy which will be used in case of a disaster will be that of Continuous availability; this strategy is chosen so that there will be continuous service delivery in the organization. For this to be possible there will be the need to have an external vendor who will provide the service. At any given point, there will be an assurance that the service will be provided for. This will enable Motorsport Regional Operations office to continue functioning if there is s disaster that is experienced. One advantage of this is that Motorsport will not be required to manage the site and this will therefore mean that time will have been saved. The RPO will be met and adhered to (Albin, 2003). This hot site strategy option will have been taken by Motorsport. Given the operations that takes place in the organization, this strategy is found to be reliable and efficient. There will also be less staff required to operate the remote site safe for the technical staff that will form time to time ensure that the data is well synchronized (Thomas, 2007). Justification of the strategy The rationale for using this strategy is that the data center will need to be the same with the operations that are being done at the organization and be some distance away from the organization location. The recommendation that is required for this strategy is that the distance be at least 35 miles away so that the probability of disaster happening in the same locations is minimal. Another requirement that will be essential here is that the connection should be there all the time. This connection type will need to be reliable so that the updates will be affected in a reliable and efficient way. The application that is running in the two locations should be the same so that it is possible for users to work from any location without any disparity. The choice for this strategy is in order as the RTO that is required for the basic operations to be in operation is immediate. This means that there will be need to have another site that will be running to realize this objective. This will be manageable with the use of continuous availability strategy. There is no other strategy that will enable the realization of full operations with the shortest RTO that has been stated (Al Mosawi, Zhao, & Macaulay, 2006). If MOTORSPORT LIMITED resorts to the use of other strategies, there will be unwanted effects that would be unwelcomed to Motorsport. The Replication/High availability strategy will not work out well with Motorsport, as the original system will no longer be available, as the data will be corrupted. Furthermore, the data will be prone to human error as there are many errors that are made during data entry. This will not be possible given the RTO requirements (Wegman, & Preiss, 2003). The other strategy is that of Remote journaling. This system is also not reliable as the updates will be made to the earliest backups that were made and there is no guarantee that there will be zero data loss. The RTO/RPO requirements that are stipulate by Motorsport will not be met. This way, it will be hard to attain the goals and objectives. Electronic vaulting is yet another strategy. The data transfer is batch, which is not a recommended Motorsport. It is highly risky for large volumes of information to be transferred across the Internet. It will not meet the lowest RTO, which is 0 hours. Although this strategy is the most expensive given all the other strategies, it is the recommended strategy given the fact that the RTO is very tight. It is the only strategy that will help to attain the critical applications that are running at Motorsport. If this strategy will not be used, then Motorsport Regional Operations will experience many losses ranging from 4000 Sterling pounds in the first day to 1million Sterling pounds after five days. There will therefore be the need to have a reliable, however expensive, recovery strategy. The use of this strategy would allow the departments to be in service normally and also allow the RTO to be as minimal as possible. Staff involved If there will be a disaster in the electronic system there are specific teams who will be responsible for the disaster and ensuring that everything comes back to normalcy or near-normalcy. The following teams will be involved. Security personnel These are the people who will be involved in alerting the responsible with alerting and warning people of the looking dangers in various places. They will also be responsible with recording of the incidences in place. They will enforce law to the perpetrators of the disaster. Apart from this, they will also be involved with supervising evacuation process. Damage assessment and recovery teams These are the staff that will be tasked with ensuring that the recovery process and the value of the damage are rightly assessed. Most of the m is the mechanical engineers, sales and procurement team who will have the stock recordings of what they had in the stock. They will also be tasked with providing temporary shelter so that the operations can pick up from that instance. They will also be tasked with building the inspection process. Service teams These are the people who will be tasked with building notification systems, transportation systems and vital records management. IT/IS experts Given the fact that the company is now opting to the online processing of procurement, the IT/IS experts will be responsible with ensuring that electronic data is rightly backed up and the information systems. They will ensure that all instances are baked and recovered. They will save the logs so that the recovery of the system will be in order. References Al Mosawi, A, Zhao, L & Macaulay, L 2006, ‘A model driven architecture of enterprise application integration’. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS-39, January 4-7, 2006. Albin, ST 2003, The Art of Software Architecture—Design Methods and Techniques. Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, 2003 Arinze B and Anandarajan M 2003, A Framework for Using OO Mapping Methods to Rapidly Configure ERP Systems. Communications of the ACM Vol. 46(2). Cheesman, J, Daniels, J 2000, UML Components: A Simple Process for Specifying Component-Based Software, Addison-Wesley,. Frankel, DS 2003, Model Driven Architecture. OMG Press. Wiley Publishing. Kenneth, FL 2004, Business Continuity Planning, a Step-by-Step Guide with Planning Forms on CD-ROM (3 ed.). (P. J. Rothstein, Ed.), Rothstein Associates Inc, Australia. Monson-Haefel, R 2000, Enterprise Java Beans, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. Rehg, JA, & Kraeber, HW 2001, Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, 2nd edition, Prentice Hall. Rolland, C & Prakash, N 2001, Matching ERP System Functionality To Customer Requirements. Proc. Fifth International Symposium on Requirement Engineering. Ross, JI, & French, JL 2009, Cybercrime: Criminal investigations,: Infobase Publishing, Motorsport DC. Thomas, MH 2007, Cybercrime: How to Avoid Becoming a Victim, Universal-Publishers, New York Wegman, A & Preiss, O 2003, MDA in Enterprise Architecture? The Living System Theory to the Rescue. Proc. IEEE EDOC Conference. Read More