Question

The management of a tertiary institution in Ghana has contacted you to design and implement an ERP system for handling their internal workflows. Among other things the system should focus on student records, students’ fees management, students’ assessment, human resource functions, and payroll management. Following from this preamble, answer the question that follow. a. What is an ERP system? 2 Marks b. In not more than a page, describe how you would go about building the requested system focusing on what you would do at the first three (3) phases of the SDLC. 10 Marks c. Which system architecture would you recommend for implementing the ERP system, and why? 4 Marks d. Based on your choice of system architecture in c, write down the major hardware and software components that you would need for the successful implementation of the system. 4 Marks e. State and explain any three (3) system conversion strategies that are used to introduce new systems into organizations. 6 Marks f. Which one of the conversion strategies discussed in e, would you use to introduce the ERP system to your client and why? 4 Marks g. State any six (6) use cases of the ERP system, and draw a use case diagram for the system using the identified use cases only.

Answer 1

a) ERP stands for Enterprise Resource planning. It is a process used by companies to manage and integrate various functions of the enterprise with ease. The core processes needed to run a company - Finance, human resources, manufacturing, supply chain , services etc, call all be integrated into a single system using ERP. This system leads to higher productivity, better insights and accelerated reporting.

b) SDLC is a well organized process for building system that guarantees quality and intends to deliver high quality software meeting client's expectations. Therefore,keeping in mind the expectations of the management of the tertiary institution about building the requested system, the first three phases of SDLC shall be done as follows:

1. Planning and requirement analysis: Requirement Gathering is the most important stage in SDLC. A meeting shall be set up with the management of the institution to gather all the requirements of the clients like what to build, who will be the end-user, what is the purpose of the product, etc. Before creating a product, a core understanding or knowledge of the product is very necessary.

2. Defining requirements: Once the requirement analysis is done, the next stage is to document the specifications and get them approved by the project stakeholders. We would document all the requirements at one place which would be accomplished through the “SRS”- Software Requirement Specification document, which embraces all the product elements to be created and developed during the project life cycle.

3.  Designing: In this stage, the requirements gathered in the SRS document would be used as information to obtain the software architecture. Through this,we would first create rough working models, or illustrations of how the software will work, how it will look, how usage flows will move from screen to screen, and more.

c) An ERP system can be divided into two categories :

1) Monolithic system architecture - developed with a single technology stack and a single vendor. It is not flexible to changes

2) Postmodern system architecture - These are more user oriented systems and is not a single product suite.

Therefore Postmodern system architecture wpuld be recommended for implementing the ERP system as these are more unser oriented and therefore the requirements of incorporating student records, students’ fees management, students’ assessment, human resource functions, and payroll management in a single system would be easy and hassle free for the end users of the system. They are simple to use to any user. Furthermore, these systems are agile which means that they are simplified, not containing redundant tables or other complicated things which were required for scalability in previous versions of different ERP products.