BUS5BIM: Business & IT Alignment in Coffee Vending Machine Scenario

This report examines the business and IT goals within a coffee vending machine scenario. The primary business goal is maximizing profit through automated sales, while the main IT goal involves creating a fully automated system that minimizes human intervention. The report includes a scenario model illustrating the inputs, conditions, and outputs of the vending machine, along with the IT aspects of updating the database, inventory, and transaction history. It highlights the importance of linking business and IT aspects to achieve a completely automated and efficient coffee vending machine operation. Desklib offers more solved assignments for students.

Running Head: BUSINESS INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Business Information Systems
Name of the Student
Name of the University

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1. Executive Summary
The scenario is about the working of a coffee vending machine that works automatically
due to the programs done inside its working algorithm. The coffee vending machine works with
the principle of receive money and dispatch a pop i.e. it will only work once the customer has
inserted sufficient amount of money inside the machine. In addition to a being a medium of
stress relief to most of the users, the coffee vending machine also finds used in IT setup as a part
of business for coffee sellers.
The goal of this particular scenario is to establish a common relationship between the
business and the IT aspects of the scenario.
2. Identification of Business and IT Goals in this Scenario
Business Goal – The main business goal as mentioned in this scenario is to generate as
much profit as possible without the chance for negotiation i.e. the price of the coffee cans
remains fixed and after a pop is dispensed for the user, the money spent on the coffee will not be
refunded back to the customer (Mithun & Jayaraman, 2017). Availability of multiple varieties of
coffee will further increase interest for customers and gather significant amount of revenue from
the sales of coffee.
IT Goals – Then main IT goal of this scenario is to develop a completely automated
feature that will manage all the operations without human interference. In the current available
design, the vending machine is programmed to perform certain actions but in many cases like
jammed can or error in calculation of paid money amount, the machine cannot take action by
itself and requires human interferences (Barza et al., 2016). Hence in order to address these

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programming issues and establish a completely automated coffee vending machine, this entire
system is to be linked with the IT aspect of the scenario rather than just considering the business
aspects of it.
3. Scenario Modelling
The business and IT scenario model of the given case study is shown in the following
diagram.

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Figure 1: Business and IT Scenario Model
(Source: Created by Author)
In the diagrammatic model, the three stages are shown and explained as follows.
Stage 1 – In the stage 1, the coffee vending machine model is shown. In this stage, the
inputs and outputs of the system are shown that include request for coffee, insert coin and

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receive the coffee can. However, the outcomes of the inputs depend on the various conditions set
in the stage 2.
Stage 2 – The stage 2 of the model shows various conditions on which the outputs of
stage 1 depend. For instance, if the amount inserted by the customer is sufficient, the system will
eject a coffee can of his request. On the other hand, if the amount is not sufficient, the machine
will eject the coin back to the customer and will not dispense any coffee.
Stage 3 – Stage 3 shows the IT aspect of the model that includes updating the database,
inventory memory and the transaction history.

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References
Barza, S., Carvalho, G., Iyoda, J., Sampaio, A., Mota, A., & Barros, F. (2016). Model Checking
Requirements. In Brazilian Symposium on Formal Methods (pp. 217-234). Springer,
Cham.
Mithun, M., & Jayaraman, S. (2017). Comparison of sequence diagram from execution against
design-time state specification. In Advances in Computing, Communications and
Informatics (ICACCI), 2017 International Conference on (pp. 1387-1392). IEEE.