Taha Mohamedali

CS190 Project Requirements

Stock Control System

Introduction:

In the developing world, many small business owners lack the technology and
education to integrate an efficient stock control and management system. They
do however often have a computer that is capable of word processing and
checking email.  I motivation for this project comes from the fact that often,
the management of such a business (often a single individual) can't keep track
of what stock is available the average lifetime of stock etc.. and thereby
having to order stock on the spur of the moment can hurt net profit. 

Businesses of this calibre include ones that sell ready-made products, sell or
fix parts of a product, or a combination thereof. Examples include a bicycle
shop, a picture framing shop and grocery shop.  In implementing this project a
stock control system can be designed to improve the management and optimization
of stock usage and as a result imrpove the net profit of the company.  

There are numerous stock control softwares out there, but the good ones are
generally too complicated, have unneccessary features and are too expensive for
this consumer market. There are also companies that tailor make systems for
businesses, but these too are out of budget in most cases. 

The ideal solution would be to create a stock control system that is simple
enough to allow the end user to configure it himself/herself and powerful
enough to fulfill the user's requirements
 
Target Audience: Small Business owners, mostly in the developing world.


Features:

Management:

 - Customizable order forms *
 - Electronic Submission of orders
 - automated stock usage optimization and deduction (to reduce wastage)
 - graphical viewing of current stock
 - tracking past stock usage 
 - tracking supplier information
 - alerts for stock re-ordering
 - printable data analyses
 - stock location tracking and reshuffling (for slightly bigger businesses)


Financial:

 - Sale statistics
 - supplier comparisions
 - stock comparisions
 - Balance sheet viewing (profits, costs, wages and more)
 - graphical representation of financial data


Customer:

- ability to view all previous transactions
- ability to view all pending transactions
- detailed information about any previous order
- Cheaper due to optimizations of stock usage

Optional Features:

- integration with fax/email software to allow semi-automated / automated stock
  re-ordering
- Different user types with different priveleges
- secure online ordering with company credit cards if applicable



Priorities: The big win here are the customizable order forms. The user should
be able to create order forms that suit the business then later change their
structure if there is a change in the type or number of items that can be
ordered.

Feature priority: 1. Management 2. Customer 3. Financial 4 other

The Financial features can be like a separate module that can be integrated in
its entirety or in part with the management side and/or the customer related
features. 

Testing:

A comprehensive testing plan will include white box and black box testing.
White box testing can be carried out during the development phase to ensure
that parts of the design are working as per the specification.


Once integration is complete, this stage will have its own set of test cases
emphasizing features that require the program's different components to work
together.

Finally there will be black box testing when integration is complete. It will
be broken down into three parts: Normal cases,boundary cases and abnormal
cases.

Bugs will be identified and regression testing can be performed on components
after bug fixes are copmlete.