Assignment Sample on E-R Modeling of Merrill Hands Tools Ltd

Introduction

Merrill hand tools is a company based in Sheffield that produces a huge range of hand tools that provides general tooling to woodworking tools and different tools needed for the agriculture process . The project will be discussed based on the Entity Relationship Diagram model which will give a clear analysis of the manufacturing division and the current information system of the company. The company was established by Mike and Linda Merrill in the year of 1980 who aimed to bring improvements in the tool manufacturing structure. The company is currently divided into three major divisions which include product development, manufacturing and the sales department. The project consists of complete analysis of the company’s working model in detail which describes the goal and objectives of the company. A top down modeling approach is discussed in the next section which will produce the ER diagram. The fun functional dependencies using the Bottom up modeling approach is also analyzed. The last part of the model shows the combination of the ER diagram and the normalized data structure. The project also shows the different processes adopted by the company which includes Manufacturing, sales and business processes.

Analysis

The organization is currently divided into three sections where each section is controlled by the Vice president who works to report to the CEO directly. The three sections are product development, Manufacturing and Marketing and sales.

Different Divisions of MHT

The product development division mainly works for designing of the tools and the testing of the proposed tools. The employment of tool designers is done by this division. The prototypes are built after the completion of the design (Al-Fedaghi et al. 2018). The prototypes mainly focus on the visual damage, coating inspection and the various anomalies involved in the process. The product design is refined after the feedback is taken from the testers. This is also needed for taking decisions for the new designs which could be manufactured for mass marketing.

The division of the manufacturing department aims at production of products that are required for market sales (Al-Fedaghi 2021). The operation is like hiring, scheduling is done by this section. The maintenance of the tools for inventory is also done by this department.

The company sells its products to various small retailers and individual shops. This department has deployed five staff who works to manage contact with their clients. The work like distributing catalogue, calling potential buyers and receiving orders is handled by this department.

Current Information system

The system at the company has a huge collection of various applications that has an inbuilt system and has expanded with the time. The team of product development takes the help of the workstation for passing on information (Bernasconi et al.2017). The record testing is done manually. This team deploys various product designers without any system staff. The clerical staff develops and makes simple database applications for the storage of the data and information. This information is related to new testers of the new tools that are in the designing phase. These applications have proved to be helpful for the maintenance of the record. It is mandatory for the team to be dependent on the professionals from the information system. The division also aims to hire staff and the centralization of the IT staff is done by the corporate management.

The department of the manufacturing uses the server of stand alone for the purchase tracking and levels of inventory (Dardaillon et al. 2020).  The codes of the application were custom written by the professionals in FoxBASE a long time back. An efficient programmer is hired by the department who is efficient in this Code. The issue arises when the superficial user interface is mostly handled by the programmer.

The sales departments consist of a local network which has five workstations and 1 server.  The shared applications are provided by the server like word and spreadsheet. The database of sales and marketing is also maintained by the server (Frank et al. 2017). There are various issues faced by the database that includes a limited number of users, and problems of concurrency control that ultimately bring major inconsistencies in the information. The two It employees have developed the sales and marketing database. There is no one in the organization who can understand this software. There is enough time spent for the proper maintenance of the database but still there is no accuracy observed.

Establishment of a new Information system Division

The CEO of the company has planned to bring a change in the information system division. The aim of this division is to have an efficiency in the information system that will conduct proper testing of the system , analyzing the patterns of sales of products , measures to control the process of manufacturing , and increasing the communication option at the workplace . This system will be developed on the basis of a server model that would include the databases which can be easily run on the different servers (Fortin et al. 2018). There are various steps that are required for establishing a division of information technology. The new division will be located at the headquarters of the company. For having the accommodation of the new division, the company will extend their premises.

 The company is now looking for a Chief Information officer. The management of the new division will be handled by CIO. The work of CIO is also to look after the operations of the new division .The maintenance of the web application is also to be done by CIO. The new IT division will have the IT personnel from the old division (Falconi et al. 2019). The hiring of three professionals will be done by this division. The three professionals include a Lead Programmer, a database Administrator and the Lead Analyst. The investigation of the various solutions will be done by the organization for the proper development of the Web application.

 Goals of the System

The following goals have been discussed by the CEO for the new division:

1. To make a administration plan which would include various functions of the organization requiring technological support
2. Development of a road map required for supporting the operation of business
3. Introduction of alternatives for the hosting of the application
4. Creation of a timeline for application development
5. Specification of the changes done in hardware
6. Execution of a strategies for the security purpose
7. Implementation of the well planned system

Current business processes

The CEO of the organization has informed all the divisions to present a documentation of the current process. This will consist of all the information about the new system and its efficiency. The company takes its order in two ways, the first one is the telephonic medium and the other is the receiving the order by the sales team. The order is generally received through emails. The order is generally received on a standard form (Grommisch et al. 2020). The sales staff does not have access to the files that have the record of inventory goods. Therefore it becomes difficult for them to inform the customers about their product delivery.

The division of manufacturing has a major portion of the premises of the company. The work of this department is to control the lines of assembly, an area that is required for the storage of goods, raw materials storage and cabins for the staff (Enquist 2018). This process comes into action when there is a huge order received every morning by the manufacturing department. This will combine all the orders that get processed into the database of sales.

The process of scheduling is complex as the supervisor takes the placed order which indicates the current scheduling process and thereby influences the decision of the scheduled task.

The leaders of the company are excelling in making appropriate decisions for the tools development which is based on the data collected from the product testing. These data would be accessed by serial number so that it becomes easy for the team to notify customers about their orders (Hossan 2019). The draw support representative takes the fault reports that include the serial number noting down the problem involved with the model. The description of problems is not up to the mark. Therefore the summarization of the problem becomes difficult to have a detailed picture of the designing of the tool and the associated problems.

Top down Modeling Approach

The top down model approach predicts the larger goals of the company that will allow the management team to easily filter the tasks of the employees present at the lower level. The top down style of practice is very relevant in the organization because of its unique nature that fulfills the goals of the organization within the specified period of time.

Here the employees receive the specific tasks assigned by the higher people. In the case of Merrill hand tools, the top down approach would be the most successful approach for the manufacturing of the products till the distribution (Motzer et al. 2018). It will ease the path of the workflow.

The significant delays would be eliminated if the approach is followed properly. The production department is making the requisition process which initiates the process of the delivery.

Bottom up Approach for Functional Dependencies

There exists a relationship between the main attributes that generally exists between the primary and non key attributes. Here the Supplier number is the primary key and the attributes that are dependent on it are the name, address, contact number, email address, and the account opening date. There may be presence of anomalies if the design of the database is not perfect.

Here the attributes present are the supplier name, supp address and the email address of the particular constraint.

 The normalization takes place in three steps. The first step of normalization consists of the description, part and the quantity (Kolonko et al. 2020). The third step of normalization contains the date, supplier name and the supplier number. The final normalization is the required no and the quantity of the goods required.

Normalization

Table 1: Normalization of entity of product department

(Source: MS –Word)

Table 2a : Normalistaion of Entity Delivery

(Source: draw.io)

Table 2b: Normalization of entity of requisition

(Source: MS –Word)

Combination of the both the approach

The inventory of the company is maintained on a real time basis. The labels are created for specific tools that remain to be part of the shipment.

Here the box is given labels and it is kept aside for the pickup (Mescia et al. 2018). The table consists of the supplier name, number address which is then combined to form a single entity under the section supplier.

The GRN number, date and the supplier anime is also clubbed into a single entity known as the GRN head. The part number, description price of every part is also entitled into a single enmity known as the part no description price.

Figure 5: Recombination of top down and bottom up approach

(Source: draw.io)

Similarly there are three more sections known as the requisition head, requisition lines and the department. This is done to make sure that the items which are shipped have been removed from the file of inventory so that there is no confusion creed at the time o0f new order placement. The combined table is very efficient for the proper maintenance of the order placed, shipment and the supply of goods.

Conclusion

ER modeling is a definite and important tool that is used to analyze the data required for the formulation of a particular database. The project has analyzed the important divisions of the company which work in a definite manner to produce valuable outcomes. The report clearly discusses three models that show the relationship between the attributes.   It also discusses the various functional dependencies and the related key factors. The second discusses the bottom up which discusses the normalization of the various entities. The combined table shows the efficiency of the overall management system.  The company would test the results that will be important for the storage of the data. These reports would be produced automatically which would rescue time and effort. This report will show what changes will be done in the specific tools so that the sales and the net profit increase.

Reference List

Journals

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Al-Fedaghi, S., 2021. Conceptual Data Modeling: Entity-Relationship Models as Thinging Machines. arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.14717.

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