Question

I need some help creating a solid business proposal to take a small business from using paper for basically everything bookkeeping such as product purchasing and sales, employee information and account information. It is a small seafood business that logs all of its product information and billing information on paper and inventory is basically all commited to memory, I would like to create a proposal to move over to SaaS for the business and would like some help with 2 questions specifically.

What system design methodologies and techniques should I use?

What potential risks do you see that may prevent successful completion of your solution design?

Answer 1

Even though the company is small, but moving over to a digital world would help them to manage their accouts and resources efficiently. It is interesting to note that you are proposing such a business to them.

1)

In my opinion, there are few techniques that can help make a better system design proposal to them.

The first thing on the system design is to undertand what the end user/customer wants. How would a system help them and make things better for them.

As always, we will look towards the System design lifecycle model: Planning, requirement analysis, design, development, Testing and implementation.

There should be a well mainitained database that provides them a user friendly approach to adding values in to the rows and columns so that they do not need to work hard on the tech part of their business.

There should be proper securit maintained for the data stored and retrieved too. Therefore, the employees who can access or modify these records must be given the authentic rights to do so using a proper username password. The employee records must be maintained.

Finally, the business must be explained the benefits of having such a system. They must be explained in details the dependencies, resources, risk involved, success metrics etc. that will help them to know the design better.

2) The potential risk in this project could be:

The system design could be Inflexible for the customer

They migh find the implementation and resources Costly and Cumbersome as buying corporate software components could be costly.

There might not be sufficient storage space in the databases as time progresses and the cost would be high

Reliance on third-party components may –sacrifice needed functionality –add unneeded functionality and create legal problems