Introduction
Willowbrook School is a small private institution located in Midwestern US. This institution offers Pre School through to grade three curriculums. The school intends to expand to cover grades four to six.
An initial survey indicates that Willowbrook School is currently expanding and the current system is now overloaded and cannot effectively sustain the processes. The main processes at Willowbrook include:
- Admission
- Class allocation
- Billing
Besides these processes, the administration needs reports to be generated by the system at some predefined times. The whole process at Willowbrook School is mainly made up of these three processes. The current expansion of the curriculum has necessitated the need to have a well-defined information management system to address the information needs at Willowbrook School. The system must be able to address the information generated and use it within these three processes.
It can be inferred that before any other process can take place, student enrollment must be accomplished first. The enrollment involves the admission process and the class allocation process.
Processes are the tasks and functions carried out by the user of a system to achieve some results (Haag & Cummings, 2007). A successful system implementation depends on the analyst’s understanding of the business processes. Models or prototypes can be used to help the user to clearly understand the business processes within (Marchewka, 2009). The first step in systems analysis involves requirements modelling which is business process investigation and documentation (Kendall & Kendall, 2004).
Admission
Kathy Gilliard as the principal of Willowbrook School is also in command of the admission process. This process involves capturing particular details about the new or incoming students. Information such as student names and guardian or parent contacts is captured during the admission process. All the background details about the student, including previous school history are also captured at this point.
Class allocation
Once the student details at the admission have been captured, the next phase involves class allocation. Currently, Kathy Gilliard also handles the class allocation process. Willowbrook School meanwhile deals with preschoolers grades 3, 4, 5, and 6. Each student will then be allocated to his or her respective class.
Billing
Willowbrook School has a billing system that is determined based on a number of options open for the guardian or parent to choose. Susan Brown the vice principal is responsible for the billing process that involves tuition and after care.
Willowbrook School has been in existence for twenty years now and has the need to effectively address the growing educational concern in Midwestern US.
In line with this need, Willowbrook School has embarked on an expansion program to effectively cover the requirements of the community in Midwestern US.
An organization designs a mission statement basing on the values, purpose, and vision they have.
Willowbrook School is an educational service provider.
The purpose of this institution is to provide affordable and effective preschooler through to grade six educational and other auxiliary services at the most affordable cost.
Willowbrook School intends to provide this professionally tailored curriculum and eventually expand it to other grades within the next decade.
At Willowbrook School, professionalism determines success. Hard work and professional integrity is the mainstay of this institution. This is all aimed at client (parent and student) satisfaction.
Therefore, Willowbrook School has their main objective being to provide an affordable avenue offering schooling services for the Midwestern community children ranging from the preschoolers up to the sixth grader. Being a non-profit making organization, this school will generally rely on fund raising and well wishers as well as volunteer services by the community and the school fraternity to support all the activities being undertaken within the school. Having a strong and well trained team; Willowbrook’s mission is to be a reputable institution in Midwestern US offering affordable schooling services to cover the preschoolers through to the sixth graders. The dedicated and dynamic staff at Willowbrook has undertaken various career related courses and have reasonable experience needed to enable them offer their service with due diligence and in a professional manner. Willowbrook School aims at remaining one of the leading institutions in Midwestern US neighborhood capable of providing unmatched services in the preschooler through to sixth grader curriculum.
The justification of most information technology projects largely depends on how the user requirements are critical to the system (Shelly, & Rosenblatt, 2010). A strong justifiable case for implementing an information management system at Willowbrook School is feasible. Initial interviews with various stakeholders within the institution reveals the need for the school at this particular stage to develop and implement an information management system. This is further justified because the current system is unable to effectively meet the user requirements (Shelly, & Rosenblatt, 2010). First, the user of the current system has to manually transfer large volumes of data between various unrelated applications. Apart from the enormous time spend doing this; the transfer process itself is not devoid of transcriptional errors. As such, the resulting reports will also reflect such errors which can affect decision making in the overall process. Due to the high error rates and inaccurate reports, in the current system processes, and the enormous effort expended by the users of the current system through manual processes, Willowbrook School information system implementation process is justified as a business case. There is therefore a clear user requirement because of these shortcomings of the current system. It is therefore justifiable to propose and implement an information management system that is likely to streamline the processes at Willowbrook School as well as making the processes at the institution more efficient and accurate.
The new fee billing system is intended to meet a number of requirements. Among these requirements, include:
- Reducing the number of errors generated while entering the admission and billing details.
- Monitoring all payments made and generating reminders and receipts for any expected payments.
- Providing statistical reports based on the available billing options.
- Providing an organized information storage system that can be easily maintained and accessed.
In particular, the new fee billing system is expected to:
- Provide a suitable user interface to allow the user to interact with the system when handling all due payments. The payments will be categorized according to payment method preference options available.
- Provide any form of statistical reports related to the fee payment process at Willowbrook School.
- Support an integrated and organized information management and storage system that can easily be accessed and maintained.
- Provide adhoc access to reports and fee payment activity at Willowbrook School.
Some of the non-functional requirements likely to result from this fee billing system will include usability where the staff in charge of the fee billing system should quickly adapt to use this system to improve efficiency and productivity. The fee billing system is also expected to carry out an acceptable number of transactions during a given period. The new system should be flexible in order to cope with the changing needs at Willowbrook School while at the same time attaining competitiveness.
Business process modelling makes use of a number of tools to effectively document the processes of the current and proposed systems. One such tool that is used to model these processes is the data flow diagram (DFD). The analyst makes use of this tool to help his team and other stakeholders to understand the workings and requirements of the current system. Data flow diagrams have symbols that represent the system entities, the data stores, the data flows and the processes. For this assignment, we are going to use the Gane and Sarson convention of data flow diagramming
References
While describing the processes within a system, the analyst can also use the decision tables. A decision table will normally accompany the pseudo code or structured English statements that are used to model the logical construct of the system (Shelly, & Rosenblatt, 2010). Every process within a system that requires logic flow to be clearly established can be effectively modelled using the decision tables. The fee payment at Willowbrook School is based on a number of options some of which attract a five percent discount.
Decision table modelling fee discount at Willowbrook School
Haag, S., & Cummings, M. (2007). Management information systems for the information age. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.
Kendall, K., & Kendall, J. (2004). System analysis and design (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Marchewka, J. (2009). Information technology project management. New York, NY: Wiley.
Shelly, G., & Rosenblatt, H. (2010). Systems analysis and design, video enhanced (8th ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Course Technology.