Case Study

Your consulting company just signed a contract with White Tower Publishers to re-write their main publications database.  This database is used to manage agreements with authors, printing or otherwise producing publications, and distribution.  During a meeting with their domain experts and business leaders, you are presented with the following narrative.  As is true with most brilliant business leaders, they tend to bounce around a lot in their narrative.

The primary business model of White Tower Publishers is to produce the works created by the authors we sponsor. Internally we consider a publication as the intellectual work produced by an author.  Some publications, like text books, have more than one author.  The products we produce and sell are different formats of the publication.

We usually sell printed publication in either hard cover or paperback to our partner distributors wholesale.  The distributers we do business to are all 3^rd party vendors.  For these books we have 2 different plants where they are printed, one in Bay City and a new plant under construction in Alma.  The Alma plant, once open, will have a sound studio where voice actors will produce publications in audiobook format. 

This system will support a new online service where customers can create accounts and purchase e-book & audiobook formats of publications.  The system will only need to maintain customer account and purchase history; all payments are handled by a 3^rd party payment processor.

Your task is to first distill the business requirements (e.g. facts, terms, and/or business rules) out of the narrative.  You may need to make assumption of what exactly the data model will look like in order to support their business needs.  For example in order to do business with authors or distributors they will need to collect contact information from them.  White Tower Publishers are very busy right now bringing their new plant online and would like to see your rough draft of the system before we begin implementation.  To that end you will need to developdevelop an entity-relationship diagram that will accommodate their business requirements. 

One final note:  this is meant to be an individual assignment.  You may work together as far as brainstorming and coming up with ideas, but each student's submission will be their own work.  You will be required to do something very similar to this assignment on the exam.