System Analysis and Design for PIBP: An eBook Publishing House in Australia

Executive Summary
The assignment is about system analysis and design for the PIBP, an eBook publishing house in
the Australia. The assignment have helped to understand how to explore a case study and find
out requirements from the case. System analysis is about understanding a process or a system. As
the current process is still manual in the case study. It helped to explore the questions related to
the benefits and challenges of the current information system. Various system designs have been
developed in this assignment. Those will be required again during the time of development.
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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Organization Background................................................................................................................4
Scope of the Current System...........................................................................................................4
Challenges........................................................................................................................................6
Documentation.................................................................................................................................7
Data dictionary.............................................................................................................................7
Process descriptions...................................................................................................................10
Appendices....................................................................................................................................10
Event Table....................................................................................................................................10
Context diagram.............................................................................................................................11
Lev 0 DFD Diagrams.....................................................................................................................13
Level 1 DFD Diagram...................................................................................................................14
Entity Relationship Diagram.........................................................................................................15
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Introduction
System analysis and design process is used by businesses to improve overall efficiency of
business processes, solving internal issues and challenges and to capture more opportunities.
There are direct impacts of the system analysis and design processes on the profitability of a
business (Roebuck, 2012). The data processing activities are dependent on the daily business
operations and transactions. System analysis and design helps a business to take a customised
approach to assess the scope of an organisation (Dennis, Wixom, & Roth, 2012), then in finding
out the benefits and loopholes in the business operations. It helps businesses to focus on the
strong areas and then improving the weak areas. It also helps to explore the types of usage of
different information systems in the business operations that will help to make the business
processes more agile and more profitable (Klir, 2013).
The purpose of the work is to get experience in system analysis and design projects based on an
imaginary case study. The details of the case study have been given and the task is to emphasise
on the current system of the business and how that is running. The scope of the work in this
assignment is on the current system rather than the any proposed information system. It does not
cover the entire supply chain management process. But it covers most of the operations of the
supply chain.
The report has been broken down into multiple sections and subsections. In the first part there
are system analysis tasks like assessment of the scope of the current system in use in the
business, the functional and non-functional requirements of the system and so on. Then in the
second part of the report there are system design diagrams like the context diagram, data flow
diagrams, ER diagrams and event table.
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I have collected data from relevant sources. Business related data have been collected from the
case study itself. Other information I have collected from the books (Roebuck, 2012).
Organization Background
Printing Incorporated Book Publishing or PIBP is an Australian publisher that specialised on
feminist books. They take manuscripts from the authors and then turns the manuscripts into
eBooks. Then the eBooks are promoted for sales and sold from the website of the company and
other sources. Other sources include major outlets and online stores, Amazon store and so on.
The reason is, they want to keep their online presence up to date. The business stresses on the
electronic and digital printing formats. It publishes books in popular digital formats including
PDF suitable for reading from Kindle like platform, and for printing, they also support MOBI
format and ePub format. The main tasks are to publish an eBook online and maintain their e-
commerce website so that customers can buy books from there and download after making the
payment.
At first, an author is approached by a sales person. This is called the lead generation process.
Now, more than one sales person reaches to an author. Once the author agrees to publish a book
from the platform, then the publishing task begins. In the publishing task, manuscripts are taken
from the authors and passed through bins for different phases of a publishing process. Staffs add
notes on the manuscripts during the process. If an author asks for the status of a manuscript then
the status is found by searching and then telling the author about the information.
Sales persons track their own data using their own systems. There is no centralized database
covering the sales data from all sales person. It creates data processing overhead while reporting
and business decision making.
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