Business Requirements Definition For Select Comfort

Business Requirements Definition for Select Comfort

CSS319: Computers and Information Processing

Group BITX212J

Mr. Carter Browne (FAC)

July 9, 2003

Business Requirements Definition

The main advantage of defining business requirements is to clearly outline what the end-user is expecting. Setting clear business requirements prevents developers from having to guess what the user wants. Misunderstood or poor requirements are one of the leading reasons projects fail, budgets are overrun, and users are dissatisfied.

Based on the information provided in the Select Comfort Retail Inventory Reporting Business Statement, the following Business Requirements Definition is submitted for review. The information contained in this document gives an overview of the business requirements and is also presented by business topics.

Overview

Representatives from the Information Systems (IS) Department met with business users in the Retail Organization (Retail) to define requirements and set expectations for the Retail Inventory Reporting Project. The key business goals of the project are to develop a system to track inventory levels at remote stores between physical inventories and to reduce unexplained decreases in inventory (shrink).

Business users have provided IS with sample reports in order to determine what data is required. Based on the reports provided, IS has created a data model showing the new tables necessary as well as data types of the fields, data definitions, and the relationships between new and existing tables. IS will be responsible for creating the physical tables within an MS SQL database once the data model has been approved.

An outside consultant will be hired to train the IS developers on how inventory data is stored in the Oracle 9i database. This consultant will be paid for by the Retail organization. Microsoft Data Transformation Services (DTS) will be used to extract the required data from the Oracle database and loaded into the MS SQL tables. The data load process will be initially created by the outside consultant and maintained by the IS department. Once the data has been successfully loaded into the database tables, the business users will be responsible for validating the data.

The main fact table will be updated daily at 1:00am, storing transactions that occurred during the previous business day as well as balances at the close of business. Data will only be stored for the current and previous physical inventory periods. The only data that will be stored as historical data will be daily on-hand balances of each accessory item for each remote store. Prior to the Oracle upgrade it was decided not to carry any historical data over from the previous database. Due to lack of history, inventory tables will only contain data beginning May 9, 2003, the date of the upgrade.

All inventory reports will be created and maintained by the business users in the company standard reporting tool, Cognos Impromptu. The business users on this