1.

INTRODUCTION Organization Overview  The Cargills (Ceylon) Limited is a Retail, Manufacturing and Distribution company which produced food and beverages under the trade name of CARGILLS .Also Cargills is a group of company which have several subsidiary companies, serves in different business fields in Sri Lanka such as Super Markets, Manufacturing of food and beverages and solitary agent of world leading restaurant chain.

The company was established in 1848 as a super class sales shop for privileged class customers and now operating as a well established, reputed and more localized company in Sri Lanka over past 150 years by providing thousands of employments opportunities to Sri Lanken citizens with contributing considerable percentage to local economy. The company has following subsidiary companies involved with different business categories. (Appendix 2-A: Figure 01)

Companies Involved In Supermarket Chain/Retail Business

This is the main business area which benefited to Cargills to develop their goodwill and to become market leader in supermarket chain in Sri Lanka as a reputed company.

1. Cargills food city limited Now 95 Sales outlets are spread in island wide and is the biggest supermarket chain in Sri Lanka. 2. Cargills express limited 17 Sales outlets associated with selected fuel service stations. 3. Cargills big city limited Largest food city range operates under Cargills regards with wider range of item categories and space. 4 sales outlets are now operating. 4. Cargills mini marts Failed in the market and only one outlet is operating at Matara. 5. Park & shop food city chain

Cargills recently acquired the park & shop food city chain with 6 retails outlets and its management which now operating under Cargills item range, computer systems and management. 6. Sentra supermarkets Cargills recently acquired the Sentra supermarkets chain with 9 retails outlets and its management which now operating under Cargills item range, computer systems and management.

Companies Involved In Production

The company was newly entered in to the production of food and beverages and obtained a considerable market share.

1. Cargills quality foods (pvt) limited Engaged in producing meats products. i.e. Cargills Sausages, SAMS 2. Cargills quality dairies (pvt) limited Engaged in producing dairy products (i.e. ice cream) under brand name Cargills Magic. This is, actually a project that assist to the National policy to help milk farmers to increase their revenue and provide large number of indirect employments. Cargills acquire this company (Walls was the brand name used before acquire) in 2002 from Unilivers. 3. CPC lanka (pvt) limited Engage in producing beverage products to the local market under brand name Kist. Marmite, Kist Cordials, Kist Jams, Kist Sources and Nectar Series (Mango Nectar, Orange Nectar etc.) are the famous products of CPC Lanka. Cargills acquire this company in 2002 with the brand name Kist.

Companies Involved In Distribution

1. Cargills whole sale Wines and Sprits Engaged in imports and distribution of world famous wines and spirits Island wide as a sole agent of most of the products

Companies Involved In Restaurants

The company was able to be the representative of the world leading restaurant chain called KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken). Now KFC become the leading restaurant

chain in the Sri Lanka with its 15 outlets servicing in the island wide. KFC is handled by the following companies. 1. Cargills Food Services Limited. 2. Cargills Food Process Limited.

Companies Involved In Other Areas

1. Cargills book city limited Importing and Selling Foreign Books. Two branches are operating. 2. Cargills vegetable processing limited Collect fresh vegetables and fruits directly from the farmers and distribute through the food city chain with lower price. This service enables farmers to get reasonable value for their production and people purchase with lowest cost because no intermediate distributors are involved.

The Information Systems And Information Technology And Telecommunication (ITC) Department Of The Organization

The ITC department is responsible for deliver the all IT Systems, Services and Communication facilities to the entire group. They have following main responsibilities, I. Identification of organizations software requirements II. Take decision to whether software is outsource or in-source and carried out cost-benefit analysis III. Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and maintenance of in-house software systems IV. Coordinate with outside software vendors to address the new system requirements and changes V. Maintaining service agreements with outside vendors (both software and hardware) VI. Coordinate with hardware vendors for hardware installations, maintenance and WAN. All hardware and communication services are fully outsource. VII. Provide software and hardware technical support, user trainings and support services.

The company uses the following three types of Information Systems to support the organization informations needs (Figure 1.1)

Management Information Systems Knowledge Level and Office Automation Systems Transaction Processing Systems

Figure 1.1: Information Systems Categories Overview

Transaction Processing Systems

o Point-Of-Sales System for supermarkets(RMS-retail stock management System) o Cash Book System o Petty Cash System o Point-Of-Sales System for KFC (RMS Restaurant Management System) o KFC Inventory Control System o Human Capital Resource Management System (OLTP System) o E-On time Time & Attendance System (OLTP System) o Cargills Payroll System o Sales and Invoice System for Cargills Quality Dairies, Cargills Quality Foods and CPC Lanka o Central Purchasing System o Cargills GL and Accounting System

Knowledge Level and Office Automation Systems

Frequently, the operational staffs (data workers) use these applications. The use of Excel is very much where, all their internal works are carried out using MS Excel (for Calculation and formulation works) and MS Word (for documentation works). MS Power point is also very popular software which is widely used as presentation software.

Management Information Systems

Mainly the COGNOS data warehousing software is used to provide management reports and fulfill their reporting requirements. Other than the COGNOS there is in-house developed reporting software which used to meet the management requirements such as 1. ItemTracker: y Generate reports to identify the fast, slow, or non moving items location wise 2. SalesRepoter: y TOP 10, TOP 100 best selling items report for retail outlet wise and TOP 1000 items report for all outlets as whole. y y Non moving item report for 30, 60, 90 days Outlet wise sales report including factories Stock Reports and Item Shortage Reports and Damages etc These reports are generated by the manager of business intelligent, executives of the ITC department.

Problem Definition Point-Of-Sales System for supermarkets (RMS-retail stock management System) is the main transaction processing system of Cargills which have more than 900
installations. This is been developing since last 10 years and now became a more sophisticated and comprehensive POS system operates in Sri Lanaka. 90% of retail outlets activities are carry out by this system. Also management has more focus on this system because its used to generate more revenues than other systems.

At present organization maintains nearly 140 retail Outlets Island wide and aiming to expand the number of branches up to 500 within next five years. The main problem associated with this goal is the POS system which they have currently using.

Following problems are related with the POS system.

1) Not a centralized system. Copy of the software with database files are running at each outlet separately as isolated software.

2) Difficulties with software maintenance because every change should update nearly 140 outlets separately. 3) Inability to get latest technology advances in the industry due to use of outdated programming language (Clipper) and databases (Dbase IV/V). 4) Programming language does not support SQL, transaction commit technologies and Object Oriented concepts. Therefore most of the transactions and updates are runs half way by resulting data inconsistence with Insert, Update, Delete anomalies. This required lot of technical and user assistant given by the ITC department to recover the system and occur very frequently. 5) Dbase IV/V uses traditional file based approach to store the data and provide significant number of problems such as i. Inability to store large volume of data. Therefore end of the day all transactions tables are backup and initialized for the next day. ii. Frequent database file crashes and loss of data became a major problem. iii. Sharing violations. iv. Inability to apply the concurrency control techniques and multi-user considerations. Multi-user approach is achieved by using Novel Netware operating system. v. Difficulties to maintain the database due to lot of files associated and exist as separate physical files. Also data and indexes are stored in separate physical files. vi. Poor database backup and recovery systems. These database related problems caused to frequent data loses and need continuous IT department involvements to solve and recover these problems. 6) Higher percentages of the daily problems are related with POS system due to software corruption, database file crashes and data loses. 7) Difficulties with providing management information accurately and address the adhoc management information requirements, because lot of effort and time required to gather data from all outlets and update the report generating systems database to take reports with refreshed data.

8) Problems with collect data to the central SQL server database which used to report generation. This process involves several steps as follows i. Copy entire database backup from the Novel Server to the Back office computer ii. Run Schedule to update data from back office computer to head office central SQL Database. Schedules are planed to run every 30 minutes to get recent transactions, but this effected to generate high network traffic between head office and outlet by reducing network performance and slow down the other software which runs through the wide area network Scheduling programs are done by in-house development team to upload data from outlets to head office, but those are not capable of handling network issues such as WAN disconnections. In these situations, schedules are become to never ending state by updating data half away and finally OS getting stuck. These problems are facing very frequently. 9) SQL Server Database at Head office did not design as centralized database. Instead of that implemented the same database file structures of the POS system and attempt to record all transactions taking place at each outlet as it is in SQL Server Database. This leads to higher degree of data redundancy at SQL Database and frequent timeout when generate queries due to large volume of data. 10) Customer service features such as Dialog Reload and Dialog Mobile bill settlements which required on time responses facing many problems with existing POS system and its infrastructure due to incomplete transactions and schedules problems.

11) The biggest obstacle they are facing is now that the POS system is running with its maximum capacity. Therefore unable to adopt the new futures, enhancements, customer service features and loyalty systems to the existing system. Customer Service Features provide organization to earn considerable amount of pure income with little or no initial and maintenance cost, because services use existing system and communication infrastructure. According to the current expansion rate of the supermarket network at Cargills, most outside organizations are interesting to make agreements with

Cargills for their payments collection activities. Thus it is important to have a system that capable for accept future profit earning activities. 12) Failure of Novel Server leads to bring all POSs to an idle state.(See Figure 01)

Head Office

WAN

Retail Outlet

Novel Server with POS Software & Dbase IV Files

Back Office Back Office PC 01 PC 02

Windows Network
POS 01 POS 02 POS 03 POS 04

Novel Network

Figure 01: Existing POS Infrastructure at each retail outlet The organization has decided to develop new web based solution to overcome the above problems and obstacles based on the following software architecture (See Figure 02).We are required carry out the proper project plan to implement this system successfully by meeting the project goals.

Head Office High end Server

High End Server with y Centralized Database with Database Server y POS Web Server with Web Application

WAN

Wide Area Network

Retail Outlet Router

POS 01

POS 02

POS 03

POS 04

Outlet POS(s) - (POS Web Clients)

Figure 02: Centralized Architecture (Intranet Web Solution) for POS

Project Objectives 1. Centralized administration: Application, Database and Database server reside on the high end server and no client installations are required. Clients access the application via Web Browser. Therefore software and database modification, changes and upgrades can be easily done and maintenance cost, time and effort can be maintained at minimum level. 2. Responsiveness to change: Provide rapid support for new products, and regular changes. 3. Ability to exploit new technologies: Web technology is one of the main technology which change rapidly and updating with latest technological advances. Thus, greater ability to use new technologies with web applications is possible. 4. Planning time for most major changes:

Little planning time is required for most critical and major changes due to the centralized nature. 5. Increased data productivity and quality: Provide ability to apply concurrency control and use of real time information. No data inconsistency exists. 6. Flexible and fast: Provide easy to use workstation for every one who uses computers, with full graphic capabilities.

2. FEASIBILITY STUDY The goal of our feasibility study is to evaluate the proposed system in terms of four major categories describes as follows. 1. Organizational Feasibility This involve with how well a proposed information system supports the objectives of the organization. 2. Economic Feasibility Identification of whether expected cost savings, increase revenue, increased profit, and reductions in required investment and other benefits exceed the cost of developing and operating a proposed system. 3. Technical Feasibility Identification of reliable hardware and software which capable for meeting the needs of proposed system, whether the selected hardware and software technologies are viable in the future and the support , technical expertise and skilled resources availability in the industry 4. Operating Feasibility The identification of willingness and ability of stakeholders of the system to operate, use and support to a proposed system.