INFO 213, S2 2015 Page 1 of 3 Assignment 2 Assignment 2 – Implementation Strategies Assignment Worth: 10% of final mark Deadline: Friday 4th September 2015 at 5pm This assignment is broken into two parts. The first part asks you to start with the point-of-sale (POS) system that you evaluated in lab 3, and perform a more complete evaluation of the system with respect to a set of requirements outlined by a hypothetical client. The second part asks you to perform a more conceptual evaluation and recommendation of two existing POS systems, without installing and testing them directly, and prepare a request for information to the vendor(s) of these products. Each task of this assignment has equal weighting (i.e., each part contributes towards 5% of your final mark) Scenario You work for a local IT consultancy firm, and have been contracted to procure a new point-of-sale (POS) system for a small retail business (“The Boardroom”) that specialises in selling skateboard equipment and related paraphernalia. You have been given the following brief: 1. The system must (naturally) allow the business to capture sales transaction information. 2. The system needs to integrate with external POS hardware (e.g., cash registers, EFT-POS readers, etc.) 3. The system must record product information (e.g., price and category), but does not need to keep inventory information. 4. The required system will record customer details for repeat customers, but must also allow for "cash" sales. 5. At the end of each month, the business would like to email "valued" customers to offer them special deals for the following month. The system would need to provide the data source of this mail merge, although the mail merge process itself could be managed through external means (e.g., Microsoft Word mail merge). 6. Any changes to the system to integrate it into the current business’ processes must be robust to future updates (e.g., must not be overwritten by future bug fixes). 7. Finally, the system should ultimately have a “look” that integrates with The Boardroom's company branding. The details of the project strongly suggest the use of an off-the-shelf solution. Your firm has identified one system that may be suitable, and you have performed a simple, but incomplete, INFO 213, S2 2015 Page 2 of 3 Assignment 2 evaluation of this system. Your evaluation of the system used a handful of criteria: functional requirements; data requirements; robustness to updates; configuration; and customisation. Your firm recognises that it is not doing its job properly by only evaluating a single system for recommendation to the client. Therefore, you have also been tasked with the job of identifying alternative systems from which to perform a comparison. Ultimately, you would identify potential solutions more formally through a request for information (RFI), but to inform that process, you have been asked to perfor.