 | Management Information Systems 4/e - James A. O'Brien | |||||
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Chapter 10: Information Systems for Business Operations
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1. ABC Department Stores:
ABC Department Stores use POS terminals connected to a server in each store to capture sales data immediately and store them on magnetic disk units. Each night the central computer in Phoenix polls each store's server to access and process the day's sales data update the corporate database and produce management reports. The next morning managers use their terminals to interrogate the updated corporate databases and view updated reports. Identify how each of the following types of computer processing is occurring in the example above:
2. Business Information Systems Which business information systems should be improved if the following complaints were brought to your attention? Identify the business function (accounting finance marketing production/operations or human resource management) and the specific information system in the functional area that is involved (Refer to Figure 10.2.)
3. Accounting Information Systems Which common accounting information systems should be improved if the following complaints were brought to our attention? (Refer to Figure 10.24.) 4. Strategic Sales Information at Action Products All members of the Action Products sales force have portable computers to transmit orders and make inquiries while making sales calls on Actions's customers. The marketing directory believes that these portables could be put to strategic use if each salesperson could provide customers with information about recent trends in the sales of Action's products. This information could help make the case for allocating additional counter space to Action Products. In addition it would help customers make better stocking decisions and thus improve goodwill. The information systems department could provide a set of information like the sample shown on the top of page 449 for each customer that Action Products serves. You have been asked to take the sample data and develop a spreadsheet application that will produce reports and graphs highlighting the most important sales trends. The reports produced should show comparisons in percentage terms where appropriate to highlight trends. When you have completed your work information systems personnel will write a utility application using your spreadsheet as a template and allowing the set of data for any customer to be automatically loaded into it.
5. A Transactions File for Boat Rentals Bayside Mart is a convenience store located on a lake in a resort area. Recently the owner of Bayside Mart decided to add boat rentals to her products and services. The set of available boats includes a canoe a kayak and a rowboat Bayside Mart has a PC and currently uses a popular accounting software package to handle basic transactions for the store. However this accounting package does not track rental items. When a boat is rented the customer is required to either leave a credit card at the store or pay a cash deposit. Bayside's owner would like to have an application that would record for each rental the customer's name the type of deposit the type of boat rented the date the time the boat was taken and the time it was returned. This information will be used to calculate how long a boat was rented so that customers are charged the correct amount. It will also track deposit information. Finally this information should allow summary reports about the usage of each type of boat to be produced. You have been asked to create an appropriate database application to produce the information just described. A set of sample data from last week's rentals is shown on the previous page. NOTE: The treatment of time mathematically varies substantially across different software products. The time-out and time-in values shown in the sample data are based on a 24-hour clock and can be stored as time variables or as integers. We are assuming that check-out times are always rounded off to the nearest hour. The number of hours a boat was rented is simply the time-in minus the time-out. If these variables are stored as integers standard math is used. If you store them as times you must use the time and data math functions of your database package to calculate how long the boat was used.
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