With the advent of e-commerce the market for cross-border parcel shipments has grown Significantly. Various parcel shipment companies operate in metropolitan areas such as Bournemouth. Their service works well for larger companies, but SME's tend to pay strong premiums
Or lack access to these shipments (http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/post/doc/ studies/2011- Parcel-delivery-study_en.pdf).
For small and medium size enterprises, there always is the post office (or equivalent), but those Prices tend to be significantly higher than the prices paid by large enterprises. Online parcel brokers Such as www.parcelbroker.co.uk and http://www.interparcel.com/ fill this gap in the market and by Negotiating deals with parcel delivery companies for bulk discounts, they then forward on to their
Customers (after taking a cut).
As long as the broker is reliable, there is very little to distinguish the various brokers beyond the Prices they offer. This makes the business low-margin. To support this low-margin process, brokers Automate most of their day-to-day processes.
Task
You will need to analyse the case, and describe/design how a broker system can work. This design should cover the back-end integration as well as address business drivers of this Case.
Your paper should cover the entire system, but should go in depth on aspects of this system. You can Choose what aspects to go into depth on (but the front-end of this system is not likely to be Interesting from the perspective of the paper).
Requirements
ILO'S ASSESSED
1. Critically analyse the role of web systems within the enterprise systems landscape, including an appreciation of the design of such systems where relevant to web information systems.
2. Critically assess, evaluate and learn existing and emerging technologies and approaches relevant to the design of web based information systems
3. Gain synthesis of the business context and business role of web information systems and the related requirements, including aspects such as security, integration etc.
4. Appreciate the distinct design challenges in web based systems where the delivery platforms are diverse and not under application control (for example delivery to smart phones)