PIBP eBook Publishing: System Analysis and Design Report

This assignment analyzes the current semi-manual system of Printing Incorporated Book Publishing (PIBP), an Australian eBook publisher specializing in feminist books. The report details the organization's background, scope of the current system, and the challenges it faces, such as outdated processes and lack of integration. It outlines functional and non-functional requirements, and provides comprehensive documentation, including a data dictionary, process descriptions, an event table, a context diagram, Level 0 and Level 1 data flow diagrams, and an entity relationship diagram. The analysis emphasizes the need for a centralized database and improved business analytics to address inefficiencies in manuscript management, sales data processing, and overall business decision-making, highlighting the limitations of the current system and the potential for future improvements through a more robust information system.

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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Scope of the Current System
The current process is semi-manual process where computers are underutilized. Rather than
using the standalone computers for different sales representative, the centralised database could
be beneficial by connecting all data from a single data store. The current system is manually
processing manuscripts. On the other hand, there are multiple online sales channels. The
company earns from different channels, but there is no centralised solution to connect all sales
figures and processing the same.
The scope of the system is limited within the manual manuscript publication, sales data analysis
and managing online order processing systems. Rest of the operations of the business are not
included in the project.
In this case, there is no information system available for the business. They use semi-manual
process. So, the functional requirements will be the functionalities being followed by them
without any help from an information system. At the same time, the non-functional requirements
are the features and attributes that are used to represent the non-functional requirements of the
current system of the organisation. A functional requirement is related to some activities
involving data processing, calculation etc. on the other hand, a non-functional requirement is
related to the attributes and features of the current system.
The functional and non-functional requirements are,
Functional Requirements:
 A sales person approaches to an author for lead generation
 Author submit manuscripts to a staff
 Staff adds handwritten notes to a manuscript
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 Staff is searching for the status of a submitted manuscript
 Publish an ebook
 Promotional events starts for an eBook
 Customer purchases an eBook
 Customer searches for an eBook
 Prepare all sales report
 Submit sales data
 Prepare accounts details
Non-functional requirements :
 Security
 Portability
 Scalability
 Accessibility
 Integrity
Use cases will be generated from the even table attached in the appendix section.
Challenges
Currently, PIBP is facing a number of challenges related to their business. The challenges are,
 The manual process of managing the operations has become out-dated and time
consuming. At the same time, it is lowering the productivity of the staffs and the business
process is taking longer time. The business process need more agility, efficiency and
accuracy. Due to the manual process, incidents of wrong data entry, data loss etc. are
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very common. For example, manuscripts may get lost from one of the bins, or the notes
added by the staffs may get lost. In that cases, the product will be developed with some
errors.
 Lack of integration among the databases and lack of suitable information system has
become challenging. There are data collected from different sources but there is no
suitable business analytics platform that can use a centralised database to answer business
management related queries like assessment of the performance of the sales staffs,
automated tracking of the sales activities and so on. Without business analytics, it is
difficult to gain competitive advantages and the business should focus on this area.
Documentation
Data dictionary
The data dictionary is developed in relation to the ER diagram given in the below section.
Table Attribute Data Type Key
Book Book_ID INT Primary
Title Text
Subtitle Text
Num_pg INT
Type Text
ISBN Text
Sales_price Decimal
Sales_freq Decimal
Unit_cost Decimal
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Qty_on_hand INT
Cat_ID INT Foreign key
SSN_Author Text Foreign key
Royalty Text
Channel Ch_ID INT Primary
bookID INT Foreign key
netSales Text
Dt_pub_sale Text
Dt_promo_sales Text
Task Task_ID INT Primary
Task_name Text
Days_to_complete INT
Web_name Text
Sales_qtr Decimal
Start_Dt Date
Finish_dt Date
Category Cat_ID INT Primary
Name_cat Text
Desc_cat Text
Author SSN Text Primary
Author_name Text
[Address] Text
Pen_Name Text
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bstTimetoCall Texttext
{phoneNumber} Text
Call_Dt Date
Call_time Text
notes Text
Employee Emp_ID INT Primary
Emp_name Text
base_salary Decimal
Pub_comm Decimal
Promo _comm Decimal
Customer Cust_ID INT Primary
Full_Name text
email text
{phoneNumber} Text
Is_Member Boolean
Member Member_ID INT Primary
PaymentAC Text
Cust_ID INT Foreign key
Order Order_Id INT Primary
Cust_ID INT Foreign key
Amt Decimal
Order_Dt Date
Item_qty INT
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Purchase_price Decimal
Offer_price Decimal
Payment Pay_ID INT Primary
Order_Id INT Foreign key
Amt Decimal
Process descriptions
The processes in the system are manual processes. The description of the processes based on the
level 1 DFD are,
 Staffs will manage manuscripts by placing those in the bins, adding notes on those,
passing the manuscripts through the bins.
 Book is published when it is ready.
 Orders are managed by the staffs when come from online sources.
 Sales records are managed by staffs who collect and processes the information
 Sales persons are supposed to generate leads.
 Reporting are managed to provide critical support to business reports.
Appendices
Event Table
An event table is like a catalogue for the underlying system. The event table for the current
business process and operations is given below. Each row represents an event. Each event must
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be triggered by some other event, external or internal. Each event has a source and a use case.
Each event has some destination also.
Event Trigger Source Use Case Destination
A sales person
approaches to an
author for lead
generation
Lead generation
call
Sales person Lead Generation Author
Author submit
manuscripts to a staff
Submission of
manuscript
Author Submit
Manuscript
staff
Add handwritten
notes to a manuscript
Addition of note Staff Add Note Staff
Searching for the
status of a submitted
manuscript
Request Status Staff Update status Author
Publish an ebook Manuscript travels
through all bins
Author Publish a book Customer
Promotional events
starts for an eBook
eBook is published Staffs Promote eBook Author
Customer purchases
an eBook
eBook purchase Customer Purchase eBook Author
Customer searches
for an eBook
Search query Customer Search a book System (website
catalogue )
Prepare all sales Sales performance Sales persons Prepare Sales Management
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report report requested Report
Submit sales data Submission of
sales data
Sales person Submit Sales data Management
Prepare accounts
details
Fetching of
accounts data
started
Accountant Prepare accounts Management
Context diagram
Context diagram is a special type of data flow diagram. It defines the boundary between the
system and the external world. The entities from the external world interacts with the system bt
exchanging data. And the system is represented by a single process.
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It does not reveal any complexities of the internal processes of the system, or how it is
implemented or any other technical details of the system. It gives the high level view of an
information system. In system analysis, a context diagram is often used to understand the system
boundaries and the context of the system. In the context diagram given above, a single process
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represents the current system of the company. There are external actors like the author, customer,
manager, accountant, staff etc. All of them exchanges data with the system.
Lev 0 DFD Diagrams
This is the top level data flow diagram created from the context diagram. It shows the primary
processes of the system.
Rather than showing the details of the processes it shows the processes, the data store and the
external actors of the system. The external actors exchange data between processes, data stores,
and other external actors.
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Level 1 DFD Diagram
Level 1 diagram comes after the level 0 diagram. It breaks down the main processes in smaller
sub processes that interacts with the external entities and exchange data.
Entity Relationship Diagram
The entity relationship diagram of the current system has been given below. It shows a high level
overview of the conceptual database design for the current system. There are primary entity sets
like Book, channel, task, category, author, employee, payment, order customer and member.
Each has its own primary key. The entities are related to one another using one to one, one to
many and many to many relationships.
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The referential integrity of the entities and relationships have been represented using the foreign
key concept and respective keys are added to the entity sets.
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References
Coronel, C., & Morris, S. (2016). Database Systems: Design, Implementation, and Management.
Cengage Learning.
Dennis, A., Wixom, B. H., & Roth, R. M. (2012). Systems Analysis and Design. NY: John Wiley
& Sons.
Klir, G. (2013). Facets of Systems Science. New York: Springer .
Ramez Elmasri, S. B. (2016). Fundamentals of Database Systems. Pearson.
Roebuck, K. (2012). Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Aspley: Emereo Publishing.
Shelly, G. B., & Rosenblatt, H. J. (2012). Analysis and Design for Systems. NY: Cengage
Learning.
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