Problems / Requirements List

The problems / requirements listed in the table below were collected during the analysis of the current physical business system for Acme Fashion Supplies.

During the investigation of the current system, the focus is not on requirements gathering.

That said, if you bump into any requirements, it's in the problems / requirements list that you record them. If the person who told you about the problem / requirement proposes a potential solution, record that, too. It's always a good thing to demonstrate that you value their time with you by treating the information they offer with importance, as it truly tends to be.

One thing you do want to elicit is any problems with the existing system. As the reverse side of the 'problem' coin is a requirement, you'll be starting to understand the things that are candidates to be addressed by the required system. Always try to find out and record the impact of the problem. Sometimes it helps to express the impact in terms of what it would enable if it were put right.

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Ref	Raised by	Short description	Full description	Proposed solution, if offered
PRL1	Bo Sibbuts	Difficulty looking up stock levels quickly	If the customer asks if we've got enough in stock to meet their order, we've got to keep them hanging on for ages while we look up stock levels. It's quite embarassing.
PRL2	Seenya Cumming	Selecting customers for mailshots takes a long time	Marketing spend a lot of time trawling through the Customer Master File to select customers appropriate to a particular campaign. They need to do this each time because the types of products they buy can change from order to order. They would like to use a version of the master sales s/sheet as it contains a lot of the info needed.	BS: When it's computerised it should be dead easy to select customer by various demographics. They could then be output into a spreadsheet from where we could copy and paste into Outlook or Word.
PRL3	Lou Skannon	Too much time compiling reports	The Sales and Returns report for the Accounts dept. takes too much time to put together each day. If it could be computerised I'd save about an half an hour a day.	LS: The master sales spreadsheet could be changed to hold the right information, then the report could be printed by a macro in it.
PRL4	Pylem Hye	Running out of stock.	Sometimes, especially during peak periods, the stock levels don't get updated properly when an order is filled. This means we sometimes run out of stock unexpectedly.
PRL5	Pylem Hye	Order online.	Some of our suppliers allow online ordering. If we could do it, it would speed up delivery and we'd be able to fill back orders more quickly.	PH: A pc and modem in the stock control room would let me do that.
PRL6	Pylem Hye	Quality checking.	We all spend a lot of time cross checking documents to make sure that all that has been ordered from suppliers gets delivered and ditto for all orders and subsequent deliveries to customers.	PH: Any computerisation must make this as automatic as possible.
PRL7	Pylem Hye	Target setting and monitoring.	We want to be able to be more precise in setting our targets and monitoring performance against them.