LKS Electronics sells household electronic goods such as televisions and DVD players, mainly through mail order. The business is owner by Mr LK Smith. The company has been around for 2 years and it is starting to rapidly expand, it currently has a customer base of around 2500. It currently has one office in South Croydon; they do not require a very large site or many locations as items are sold mainly by phone. The company has 8 telephone sales staff, 3 packaging staff, 1 stock controller, 1 finance and credit control, 1 transport person, 1 caretaker and the manager. The good are sold to almost anywhere in the United Kingdom, they hope to expand…

The customers phone up the company to make an order, a member of staff answers the phone and writes down the details on a form. The company obtains the different items it sells from different warehouses. They always keep most popular and common products in stock and when the stock falls to a certain level/something that is not in stock is ordered, they order the number of units required from the warehouse. A delivery company is hired to deliver the orders to the customers. At a certain point in each day, for all the transaction not yet completed yet, the order forms are processes, item(s) ordered from warehouse, delivery company found and finally invoice made. The company advertises itself through advertisements in newspapers and magazines and it show what products they have on offer though catalogues.

Each transaction needs to be recorded down. When an employee records down an order on a form, the details required are a unique number for the transaction, the customer’s ID number and their own staff ID number, the date and the delivery address. Afterwards, a suitable delivery company (depends on delivery address) will be selected. When a driver has been allocated for the delivery, he/she will be recorded down. Other Information that they recorded is details of the warehouses, staff, delivery companies and items they sell. The forms are stored in a filing cabinet system, which is arranged in order of transaction date.

When the company needs an item/items, the staff orders them from the appropriate warehouse. The business already have Microsoft Access installed on all their machines with the Microsoft Office package and all the users have familiarised themselves with it slightly so it would be the best choice, buying another database program would be pointless as the users would have to familiarise themselves with it and it would add to the cost. Mail merge could be done with Microsoft Word, which is another advantage of using Access.

The business already has enough PCs that are more than capable of running the new system. 100Mbps Ethernet cables will be required to network all the PCs together so that the system and the data can be shared and identical on all the machines. The printers can also be shared; anything that needs printed can be done directly from any machine rather than through just one machine. A relatively cheap colour laser printer such as the HP Colour LaserJet 1500L will be bought to for fast printing needed to produce the monthly catalogues. The current dot-matrix printer can be used for printing off invoices.

User’s level of information technology skills The users have the keyboard skills required to use the new system and are as said before, familiar with Access and also with Word, which will be used with mail merge. The new system will have an easy to navigate interface so will not require much training or familiarisation to use.