Appliance Warehouse Case�Katelyn Espinoza �Computer Science, St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, TX 78228
Development Tools and Languages
The CASE tool used to create Figure 1, Figure2, and Figure 8 was an online software known as Lucid Chart. Diagrams.net was used to create Figure 4. Another development tool used was a software called Gantt Project that created Figure 5 and Figure 6. Microsoft PowerPoint was used to create Figure 9 and Figure 10. The last tool used was Microsoft Word, which assisted in the creation of Figure 3, Figure 7, Figure 11, Figure 12, and Figure 13.
Introduction and Background
Appliance Warehouse is an appliance store welcoming a brand knew software into their company. The system, known as Service Information Manager (SIM), aims to allow customers to come to appliance for all their servicing needs. SIM would not only allow the customer to purchase appliances and request parts, but it would also allow the customer to request appointments with Appliance Warehouse’s top technicians to fix or install those same appliances. SIM would also benefit the employees of appliance warehouse by addressing the needs and wants of the workers within the system such as receiving appointment reminders, displaying a calendar of appointments, and even built-in appointment setting forms. While attending to all these capabilities as well as maintaining scalability and supporting mobile devices, the new system would be a perfect match for Appliance Warehouse. The following figures each represent a piece of the system analysis done in order to guarantee SIM can live up to the vision Appliance Warehouse has imagined and continues to maintain since 1985.
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Results and Conclusions
When it came to scheduling and time management, Figure 3, Figure 5, and Figure 6 was extremely important. The work breakdown structure (Figure 3) demonstrates the approximate time needed to complete each task to create the SIM system. The Gantt Chart (Figure 6) and PERT chart (Figure 5) were both useful for visualization that information in a simple graphs that can easily be used for new projects besides SIM.
Entities within the system was another issue that must be solved. Within the analysis, the relationships between entities had to be determined in order to understand who can receive, send, and monitor information. The Context Diagram (Figure 1) and Entity Relationship Diagram (Figure 2) both display those relationships in detail.
Appliance Warehouse also requested that the system would provide discounts for the customers. Using a list of requirements provided by Appliance Warehouse, a Decision Table (Figure 7) and Decision Tree (Figure 8) were used to outline what customers qualified for a discount.
In order to determine whether an in house developed software was better for appliance warehouse over an installed software or software as a serve, a presentation was created to see the benefits of each. It was decided that, although he costs for in house development seen in Figure 9 and Figure 10 was more expensive, an in-house software would address all the requirements required.
Lastly part of the creation of SIM required the system analyst to create a user interface that was easy to use and left no room for the user to make mistakes. Static screens such as Figure 11 and Figure 12 was simpler since it did not require user input, but it still had to maintain the look of the system and have an easy-to-use navigation. Figure 13 was the user input example. This screen needed user validation as well as east to understand user input such as a calendar option.
(Figure 4) Hierarchy of Appliance Warehouse System.
(Figure 1) Context Diagram.
(Figure 2) Entity Relationship Diagram.
(Figure 5) PERT Chart
(Figure 6) Gantt Chart
(Figure 7) Decision Table
(Figure 8) Decision Tree
(Figure 9) Cost of In – House Development Breakdown
(Figure 10) Total In-House Development Cost for a Year
(Figure 3) Work Breakdown Structure
(Figure 11) Main Menu Screen of SIM Software
(Figure 12) About Us Screen
(Figure 13) Sample Input Screen