Service Request Sr-Rm-005

Project Proposal

May 25, 2008

CIS/319

Background and Goal

Riordan Manufacturing is a complex, billion dollar company with five separate sites that reaches from Albany, Georgia, all the way to China, and corporate headquarters in California. A fortune 1000 company, Riordan looks to thrive for many years to come. In order to for this success to continue and for the company to see growth, the company must continuously evolve to keep up with changing times. Like many companies, Riordan and create a web site to make its presence known to those who frequent the Internet. Riordan wants to make its customers business experience with them as quick, easy and pleasant as possible. With plants spread through out the world it can prove difficult to have control over inventories needed to continue production at a profitable level. Integrating a customer friendly web site and database is what Riordan needs.

Using a more traditional method, Riordan currently houses its data in separate files. This means that any time a transaction occurs between Riordan and a vendor, a series of separate process must occur. One application takes care of billing; another takes care of shipping and a third application addresses inventory control and record keeping. Currently, these transactions are not conducted through the company web site. As is, the company web site is no more than slightly informative as to what the company has to offer. So, when an order is placed from Riordan to vendor or customer to Riordan, the transaction must take place over the telephone.

The process to place an order with a vendor can be quite time consuming. Firstly, a Riordan representative must go through its current inventory to establish which item needs to be ordered and how many. Next, the representative must figure out which vendor distributes the needed product. Then, using this information, the Riordan representative will make separate calls to separate vendors until all the necessary parts or products are ordered. During each call, the Riordan representative must also establish whether there will be an inventory issue with any vendor then recalculate accordingly. Upon completing each purchase, the representative must manually input the ordering information into the inventory system and then into the billing system. With customers that are ordering from Riordan, a somewhat similar process occurs. As one can see, just to order the right parts to complete a product can be quite tedious and become somewhat of a hassle.

As with any business, the more efficient a process is the more products can be sold, which means there is more money to be made. Couple this with the fact that customers do not want to spend a lot of time completing a transaction, and there is an issue that clearly needs to be addressed. A web site will provide a list of products and services it has to offer, allowing the customer to select from any product available, quantity of products to be purchased, price of each item, both individually and collectively, view instant totals for all products purchased, factor in applicable taxes and choose from various shipping methods including: Overnight, Next Day or Standard Mail. Behind the scenes, the database will send constant information back to each respective inventory department and information will be sent to the company headquarters in San Jose documenting purchase habits. This system will also document which vendor provides each respective product. Using a Database Management System to combine all processes into one, using the company web site as a centralized hub in which most business will take place. The database will also combine all five of Riordan’s location into a more unified structure.

Riordan is committed to giving clients the best services, combining a top level database with a customer friendly web site will benefit Riordan in many areas of the company. Sales departments will have real time access to product availability, to better serve new and returning customers. These new changes will also be a great tool for marketing professionals. Using the web site can be advertising in itself, but with access to sales information marketing department can use positive feedback from existing customers to entice new customers. It is also important for customers to feel safe in their transactions, which makes it equally important for Riordan to implement the safest site for customers to do business and ensure return.

The IT department is important in this type of situation. The approach to support our IT solutions involves both basic hardware requirement decisions as well as being able to have the hardware communicates with and supports the advanced configurations your database can or will provide. This is where they help find a way to archive information needed to keep productions running smoothly. Inventory of items needed for production can be held in a database that can reorder and have items delivered as needed for each production location. That database can also be accessed and monitored from the California home base location. Our clients have tasked us to create a database through an SDLC to be used in a business 2 business web site allowing Riordan manufacturing to order materials via the Web from its vendors as well as provide a system that will provide Business customers the ability to use the services and products offered by the company. Hardware considerations for such a project are absolutely crucial to the system’s applicability and reliability toward Riordan’s IT goals, and finding the hardware solution that will merge with chosen software applications in order to support the database system for Riordan Enterprise is an absolute must.

First and foremost, the decision has been made to go with the same manufacturer for all database hardware components. This will ensure the broadest compatibility with all components in question and will maximize support for the database system. The chosen manufacture for Riordan’s database hardware is Dell. Additionally, Dell pre-configures its hardware to operate with each other prior to shipping which will offer a seamless integration into the network and optimize functionality between both server and storage devices to reduce further complications in hardware configurations.

In designing this system, we chose to use the Linux operating system as the foundation of the database due to the fact this system is can be easily configured to the needs of the company. We will use Oracle database to organize the various applications that Riordan uses in everyday business. This means that using the Riordan web site, a secure portal will be established with each vendor that provides product to Riordan Manufacturing.