Northwind S Requirements

NORTHWIND’S REQUIREMENTS

Background:

Northwind Trading Company was started in 1987 by Hans Horn, a Norwegian living in the U.S. Hans missed many of the products from his homeland Norway and decided to start importing them for sale to friends and family in Oshkosh, Wisconsin where he was living at the time.

The business did so well that Hans decided to expand his business to import products from all over the world, sixteen countries at last count, to customers living anywhere in the world. In fact Northwind needs a system to help manage this expansion.

Project Purpose:

An integrated system that will help Northwind Traders maintain information about their products, suppliers and customers.

Project Objectives: (in order of priority)

A. Maintain accurate product information to improve order fulfillment. Currently only able to confirm product availability for 60% of orders made within 60 seconds of request (resulting in 20% of these orders being lost); improve this to provide product availability for 95% of all orders within 45 seconds and only 3% of orders lost. B. Reduce inventory quantity in order to reduce inventory obsolescence and damage by 30%. C. Eliminate errors in creating the customer invoices. (Errors include inaccurate calculations, billed or shipped to wrong address, billed to wrong customer). D. Eliminate errors in orders to suppliers (errors include wrong supplier, wrong address, product not carried anymore by supplier) E. The new system must be easy to use as measured by no need for training for end users. F. Nearly 20% of all orders are shipped after the promise date; improve this to no more than 5%. G. Reward salespeople and country managers based on their sales volumes by quarter and year.

Project Requirements (with link to project objectives)

1. Products – a. Define product categories to speed up product lookup (Objective A) b. Be able to add/delete/modify product categories (Objective A) c. Maintain qty in stock, pricing by unit and quantity per unit (Objective B) d. Display a picture of the product category on the screen (Objective A) e. Identify products which have been discontinued (Objective A) f. Provide a report for products including qty in stock, sorted by product name and product category. (Objective E)

2. Suppliers – a. Maintain supplier name and contact information which can handle international addresses for anywhere in the world (Objective D) b. Be able to add/delete/update products by supplier (Objective D) c. Be able to add/delete/update suppliers (Objective D)

3. Customer Orders – a. Maintain customer billing and shipping addresses (these can be the same). Customers can live anywhere in the world (Objective C) b. Maintain order date, required date and shipped date for all orders (Objective F) c. Invoices should be created directly from the order(s) to reduce errors and include the following information: product name, qty, discount, extended price, subtotal, shipping and order total. Extended price, subtotal and order total should be calculated fields (Objective C) d. Maintain salesperson reference information on each order for commission purposes (Objective G) e. Able to easily produce reports including sales by country, customer and category by quarter and year. (Objective G) f. Able to quickly produce a customer invoice from the customer order(s) and print it or send it electronically. (Objectives D and E)

4. Other – a. Develop short cuts for power users for things that are done more than once a day (Objective E) b. Reports should be formatted for both viewing in Access and for some reports by a browser (these reports will be identified by the customer) for easier distribution within the organization (Objective E)