Overview
The Company
Ceylon Textile Suppliers (CTS), an Australian owned organization based in Melbourne which supplies clothing related products to Australian and New Zealand retail outlets on a sale or return basis. It has an annual turnover of around $ 60M and plans to expand this. The current business processes for operations have limited and ad-hoc IT systems to support them. Business processes are mainly manual and the inter-departmental communication of information is largely paper-based. There are a number of issues with operations recognised by the staff running these processes, which interfere with smooth running of their departments.
Ceylon Textile Suppliers: new IT-based strategy
CTS’s Board of Directors has declared a strategy to expand the business’s operations to embrace the latest developments in information technologies, specifically web-based technologies and the opportunities it presents. This is likely to include a web interface and web presence beyond purely brochure-style one in place. The strategy requires sales and stock operations should be automated, integrated support to achieve efficiency gains and the ability to inter-operate with any internet technologies and opportunities it present to CTS’s new strategy. The Board of Directors wants a phased implementation to realise benefits quickly and to minimise the risk of interruption to its core operations.
Swinburne consultants
CTC’s Board of Directors have contacted Department of Information Systems Logistics and Entrepreneurship at Swinburne University of Technology to help them to achieve their new strategic directions and requested a proposal to conduct a comprehensive review of its processes to identify areas for improvement and to implement their IT-based strategy. They also requested Swinburne to propose a suitable internet-based automated solution to facilitate its new strategic initiative as second stage of the project.
Project requirement
As a first step of the proposal, the Swinburne consultants have prepared an initial review report that includes current processes related to of sales orders, stock control, and advertising campaign. Your task is to provide requirement specification models and suggest a preliminary IT solution (preferably an ERP solution) as indicated in marking guide.
This request contributes 70% to your final mark.
Due dates: See Canvas for individual component due dates
Summary
This consultant report provides initial findings of:
- A high level view of the current processes (as-is)
- A high level view of the important data used in current manual system
These findings will use to improve the efficiency of operational processes and provide the organisation with an IT support needed (preferably an ERP system). At the end of this initial study, it is expected that a full study will be carried out to streamline the existing processes and recommend a final IT solution.
Stakeholders
The following stakeholders have been identified as direct or related interest of the proposed project. We believe that these stakeholders can strongly influence and make decision about business requirements.
- The Chief Financial Officer (CFO): Barak Obama
- The Sales and Marketing Director: George Bush (keen to see improvement in the efficiency of the sales operation but he is also interested in how the work might inform aspects of what the new website (out of scope) may and must cater. George also act as a Project Sponsor
- Human Resource Manager: John Howard
- Operations Staff Representative: Andrew Barr
- The Stock Manager: Julia Gillard, will be Ambassador User Representative (primary representative for helping with the analysis or arranging access to operational staff)
Organization Chart
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Scopre of the project
In scope
Purchasing
Stock Control
Sales
Dispatch
Goods In
Customer sales data for marketing campaigns
Out of scope
Accounts processes
Marketing department (except as above)
Human resource department (COS10020 project focus on this process)
Travelling salesforce
Process descriptions
Sales orders
The sales team raises sales orders as a result of receiving customers’ purchase orders (by post twice per day), orders passed in by the travelling sales team and sales calls received or made throughout the day. As and when they are received they are recorded on the sales team’s master sales spreadsheet (MSSP), which is used to print out the multi-part sales order.
Dispatching of goods
The two-part dispatch and delivery note forms that are received from the Sales Team drive the dispatch process. A Goods Out member of staff collects stock from the shelves for a customers parcel and ticks off the items on the dispatch note as s/he goes.
When the parcel is complete, the delivery note is attached. Completed parcels are put in the goods out area for collection by the courier, who calls to collect four times a day.
The dispatch note is used to update the stock master file with the new stock levels; the number filled on each order line is subtracted from the present stock level to give the new. The dispatch note is then put on a stick pin. Once or twice a day they are handed over to stock control.
Stock controls
This area is responsible for maintaining stock at their pre-determined levels. It must take into account targets for marketing campaigns, including any new and discontinued products (notified by the marketing department).
The stock manager is the one who primarily does this, although some cover is provided by other members of the stock team (i.e. Goods In and Out staff).
The stock manager examines stock levels on the stock master file for those that are below or nearing their minimum stock holding level. For those that are, she raises a purchase order, perhaps phoning the preferred supplier first on important orders, to confirm the order can be met. If not, he will raise the order with one of the alternatives.
She updates the stock master file record with the purchase order number to show that it is on order. If a supplier subsequently puts an ordered product on back order, then the expected delivery date is filled in.
During the day the stock manager uses this information of, Goods In pass over delivery notes from suppliers and returns notes from customers-to update stock holding levels on the stock master file. For each filled order line, the purchase order number against the product on the master file is cleared.
The stock manager is given every dispatch note once the order has been filled. If any stock level anomalies arise, these can be checked. Otherwise, they are filed in the customer master file. The only exception to this is if an order line couldn’t be filled. These dispatch notes are passed back to sales operations so the customer can be notified.
At the start of the day, old returns notes are passed back to sales operations, together with a report showing items dangerously low on stock.
Goods receipts
Returns from customers and purchases from suppliers are received first thing in the morning and then, intermittently, throughout the day.
Goods In checks the items into stock and updates the stock levels on the stock master file. The returns and the delivery notes are passed to the stock control manager two or three times a day. If returned items are not fit for stock this is marked on the returns note.
Marketing and advertising campaign
The marketing department carry out marketing campaigns on monthly, seasonal or ad-hoc basis. Campaigns are to:
- Introduce and push new product ranges
- Shift product about to be withdrawn
- Target specific customers with offers and discounts
- Move poorly performing product
They use the sales reports provided by sales operations to target the customers for 2 and 3, above. 1 and 4 tend to go to the whole customer base.
Marketing keep a mailing list database in Excel of all customers and manually select those that are to be included in a mail campaign (they use MS Word for this).
Mails by marketing presently are all paper-based as some or all of brochures, vouchers and product catalogues accompany the mails.
From time to time they trawl through the entire customer master file to bring their MSSP up to date.
When a campaign is planned and during its execution marketing keep the stock manager updated with targets and expected sales volumes (so that demand can be met from stock).