Organization Overview
Exotic Atom is an Australian based clothes store that has its headquarters in Melbourne and has its branches located in Sydney and Auckland, New Zealand. The store specialized in ladies designer wear such as embroidered outfits, resort wear along with embellished gowns. There are currently hundred resources that are engaged with the organization.
Design team that is engaged with the organization is making use of a single designing application as 3D Imager. There are several operational and technical issues that are associated with the tool that is now impacting the productivity of the employees. There is a random procedure followed in the tool for matching the fabric with a design, sampling activities along with sorting tasks. There is a lot of time that is wasted in traveling to obtain the fabrics. Also, the communication offered by the tool is not efficient.
The solution that has been proposed in order to overcome the issues existing with the current designing tool is in the form of a desktop application. This desktop application will provide an integrated platform for the designers that will have a back-end attacked to it for the storage of the information. Activities related with matching of the fabrics, online deliveries, sampling, sorting and many others will be made possible with the application.
- Ability to allow the designers and end users to login to the application in an authenticated manner
- Ability to allow the designers to store and save their illustrations and designs in the database which will be termed as design bank. This design bank shall present the designs in specific categories and types.
- Ability to allow the designers to book the desired fabric and check its delivery online.
- Ability to allow the designers to update their progress and status by sharing the report with the Head Designer.
- Ability to match the fabrics with the designs that have been created
There are several costs that are currently associated with the design tool and activities in terms of cost of travel, cost of tool, cost of resources, operational costs and maintenance costs.
The desktop application that will be developed for Exotic Atom will eliminate the cost of travel as it will allow the employees to book and track the fabric deliveries online. There will also be lesser costs involved in the maintenance and upgrades. The tool will primarily be based upon the automated algorithms and patterns and there will be lesser resources required for its administration which will reduce the resource costs as well.
There will be a total of 8000 NZD that will be saved after implementation of the tool in a period of six months which will lead to an annual benefit of at least 16000 NZD. There will also be several benefits that will be offered to the employees as they will be able to experience streamlined activities and will be able to offer better quality to the customers.
The desktop application that will be developed for Exotic Atom will primarily target the following user types:
- Design Team associated with Exotic Atom including the Head Designer
- In-house merchandisers
- Senior management and business owners
The Problem
The strategy of Exotic Atom is to provide the customers with best in-class outfits to make sure that their levels of expectations and satisfaction remain high at all times. It aims at coming up with new and innovative designs of the outfits in the market to enhance the fashion statement of the customers.
The application that will be developed for Exotic Atom will adhere completely to the business objectives and strategies of the organization as it will aid in improving the designs and the procedure involved. The desktop application will overcome the issues that are present with the current tool and will streamline all the design activities leading to an alignment with the business goals (Schierholz, Kolbe and Brenner, 2015).
The desktop application that will be developed for the design team and other users of Exotic Atom will result in a number of advantages and will add to the value earned by the organization.
- There is a lot of cost that is spent on the traveling of the employees to obtain fabrics which will come down (Burkhart, 2016).
- There will be enhancement of the productivity and efficiency levels of the employees by at least 30% from the current levels.
- The enhancement will also be seen in the levels of customer satisfaction which will grow up by another 35%.
- There will be an overall cost saving of 16000 NZD annually.
JAVA will be the programming language that will be used for the development of the application’s front end. It will provide the ability to scale the application up or down as per the requirements and will also offer inter-operatibility. The back end of the application to create a design bank and store other information will be done using the database engine as MySQL.
It will be necessary to include cloud services in the application as the application will be accessed by the internal employees along with some of the external entities. A private cloud will be used for the purpose with the delivery model as Platform as a Service (PaaS). The model will provide the development team and the implementation engineers with an adequate platform and will also offer enhanced security along with reduced infrastructure costs (Gartner, 2012).
There are several strategies and methodologies that are present which may be used for the development of the application. The one that will be applied in case of the desktop application for Exotic Atom will be the agile framework and agile methodology. This strategy will provide the developers and other project resources to carry out the activities in a value based and ad-hoc manner and will also involve clients at all times. The quality of the end product will be high and the number of risks encountered will be minimum (Sharma, 2016).
Testing is considered as an activity that comes after development which will not be the strategy that will be followed in this case. Parallel validations and verifications will be performed right from the first phase which will include testing types as integration testing, system testing, regression testing, load testing, security testing, UI testing and performance testing.
Concept and Solution
The users of the desktop application will not be restricted to a particular nationality and origin. Also, the app will be necessary to be usable at a global scale and it will therefore be essential to include the following set of features.
- The users shall be provided with the customization option in the application in order to customize the app on the basis of the language. There shall be sixty different language options that the users may choose from.
- Responsive design along with enhanced Human Computer Interaction (HCI) principles shall be used and reflected in the app (Karray, 2015)
- There shall be several modes of payment that shall be integrated such as credit and debit cards, PayPal, e-wallets etc.
- The desktop application shall adhere to international rules of Intellectual Property and Information Security along with Information Ethics.
Social media is an integral component in the modern day business activities and presence on the social media networking accounts has become mandatory (Woodrow, 2016). Same shall be followed in case of Exotic Atom as well to maximize the customer base and to make the customers aware about the latest developments taking place in the organization.
There shall be options provided to the users to access the application using the credentials of their social media accounts. Also, the ability to post or share content on social media through the application shall also be included to offer enhanced integration to the users.
The desktop application that will be developed for Exotic Atom will be exposed to a number of risks to the security of the information. These risks will include the information braches, information loss along with the leakage. There may also be risks related to the technical failures, operational errors, management risks and legal risks. These risks will be required to be handled and managed with a defined process including identification, analysis, treatment and review of the same to make sure that the impacts resulting out from the same are controlled in a timely manner (Analyze, 2016)
There shall also be protection and prevention mechanisms that shall be implemented and followed to manage the risks. Administrative controls and measures shall be taken to make sure that every project related activity and component is validated and there are frequent audits and reviews carried out. There shall also be technical and logical measures taken to make use of advanced and automated tools for controlling the risks to the information and protect the privacy of the same (Berg, 2016).
The strategies that will be followed for the deployment and integration of the desktop application will include the gradual and phased deployment rather than following a big bang approach for the same.
Acceptance testing will be carried out by releasing the beta version of the desktop application for the end users which will be used and the feedback and response will be collected to understand the defects and faults associated with it. The comments received will be incorporated in the final version that will be deployed on the private cloud using PaaS model of cloud computing.
Key Features
User acceptance is a necessity for the desktop application to make sure that the application is designed and developed as per the specifications and requirements of the users. testing will be carried out by releasing the beta version of the desktop application for the end users which will be used and the feedback and response will be collected to understand the defects and faults associated with it. The comments received will be incorporated in the final version that will be deployed on the private cloud using PaaS model of cloud computing.
There may be many changes that the desktop application may go through from its initial phase to the release of the same. Also, there will be many changes that will be introduced with the release of the application in the organization. These changes will be managed by the process highlighted below.
- Preparation: This will be the first phase in change management which will include planning tasks and activities along with approvals on the changes in the application (Hegde, 2016)
- Management: Management will be done by the execution of the changes which will include the practical applications, evaluations, reviews and feedback.
- Reinforcement: It will be the last phase which will include final checks and completion.
The database that is currently deployed in the organization will be required to be integrated with the database associated with the desktop application. 3D Imager is a tool that is currently used in the organization and its database will be migrated with all the information transferred to the new database. There will be validation checks performed to check the compatibility and the conversion process will take place in a series of phases.
Apart from the design team, there are several other teams and organizations that work and exist in Exotic Atom that have huge clusters of information associated with them. The data associated with the departments and enterprise as a whole will be integrated with the desktop application using an enterprise application such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). This application will allow the entire data associated with the enterprise as a single unit.
Maintenance and support are the activities do not have a finish date and are required to be implemented till the application is in use. The same will apply to the desktop application developed for Exotic Atom as it will require maintenance to be done so that the version specific security risks and attacks may not be executed. Also, there are several technological changes and advancements that keep taking place and the application will be upgraded as per these changes (Weiderman, 2016).
- There will be an enhanced customization and personalization included in the application in terms of its themes and color schemes.
- Security of the application will have scope for enhancements as it will be necessary to include the latest security mechanisms at all times.
- Login is the first step to validate the authenticity of the user which will be enhanced using biometric detection systems along with multi-fold security and authentication.
Conclusions
There are several system qualities that shall be included in the application in terms of the enhanced usability, reliability and performance. It shall also be made sure that the application is adaptable and reflects high degree of scalability and maintainability. Security is one of the important concerns that shall always be taken care of by including advanced security mechanisms.
The application shall be developed using JAVA as the programming language and MySQL as the database. It will offer several advantages in terms of robustness and inter-operatibility.
References
Analyze, I. (2016). Risk Management. [online] Available at: https://agile.csc.ncsu.edu/SEMaterials/RiskManagement.pdf [Accessed 11 May 2017].
Berg, H. (2016). Risk Management: Procedures, Methods and Experiences. [online] Available at: https://ww.gnedenko-forum.org/Journal/2010/022010/RTA_2_2010-09.pdf [Accessed 11 May 2017].
Burkhart, S. (2016). Enabling mobility withing your organization. [online] Available at: https://rsmus.com/pdf/wp_aligning_mobile_apps_to_your_business_strategy.pdf [Accessed 11 May 2017].
Gartner, (2012). Platform as a Service – PaaS – Gartner Cloud Computing. [online] Gartner IT Glossary. Available at: https://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/platform-as-a-service-paas/ [Accessed 11 May 2017].
Hegde, A. (2016). What is change management. [online] Available at: https://www.andrewneang.com/research/2008-GTP/ChangeManagement_v5.pdf [Accessed 11 May 2017].
Karray, F. (2016). Human-Computer Interaction: Overview on State of the Art. [online] Available at: https://s2is.org/Issues/v1/n1/papers/paper9.pdf [Accessed 11 May 2017].
Schierholz, R., Kolbe, L. and Brenner, W. (2015). Strategy Alignment of Mobile Solutions in Customer-Oriented Processes. Wirtschaftsinf, 47(1), pp.17-24.
Sharma, S. (2016). Agile Processes and Methodologies: A Conceptual Study. [online] Available at: https://www.enggjournals.com/ijcse/doc/IJCSE12-04-05-186.pdf [Accessed 11 May 2017].
Weiderman, N. (2016). Approaches to Legacy System Evolution. [online] Available at: https://www.sei.cmu.edu/reports/97tr014.pdf [Accessed 11 May 2017].
Woodrow, M. (2016). 9 Tips for Integrating Social Media on Your Website : Social Media Examiner. [online] Socialmediaexaminer.com. Available at: https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/9-tips-for-integrating-social-media-on-your-website/ [Accessed 11 May 2017].
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