Information Systems
Acompany, PlayOn Toys, has been in business for five years. It manufactures toys forthe European market, with plans to expand its customer base to America, Asia and Africa in the next three years.
This year, it had a turnover of 5 million euro, with a pre-tax profit of 1.4m euro.
One of the difficulties it has experienced with such rapid growth is the inadequacy of its current IT infrastructure. At present, product, customer, sales and financial information is spread across a number of small databases, electronic files and paper files at the Dublin site.
They currently manage about 3000 sales orders per year, spread across approximately 200 customers. Their reporting and transaction requirements are highly dependent on manual processing. For example, customers can enter sales orders on the PlayOn Toys website. But at the backend, the sales information is simply emailed to one of the sales administrators who have to print it and log in a spreadsheet.
Their manufacturing operation, whilst still fairly simple, has expanded from 2 products to 20 different products over the past two years. These 20 products in turn, consist of 110 different product parts, sourced from 30 suppliers.
The Chief Executive of the company needs to assess the following:
1) Should PlayOns Toys invest in a Database Management System?
a. If not a DBMS, what is their alternative?
b. Should they consider open source?
2) Should PlayOns Toys invest in its own fully fledged Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERP)? As part of this, the CEO wants to see a high level Entity Relationship Diagram and description of someof the typical ERP functions, such as sales management or inventory control.
3) Should PlayOn Toys be looking to outsource some or all of their data management to "the cloud"?
Assignment
The CEO has hired you to prepare the briefing document that the CEO will present to top management in response to the three questions above.
The document should address each of the three questions above, outlining the pros and cons of each option. When considering each option, include indicative costs if possible and indicate possible suppliers. The document should be clearly laid out, with each of the three questions clearly considered.
As a summary, an overall recommendation should be made. The document should not exceed 8 pages (excluding appendices).
References should be included in the appendix.
The ERD plus ERD description requested for ERP functions should also be included in the appendix.
Marks will be awarded for the quality of the discussion for each of the three questions, and the extent to which the circumstances of PlayOns Toys organisation have been considered.
Quality of overall document, references and summary recommendation: