One of my students submitted a problem statement document.
(See the images below for the actual problem statement document)
Below are my comments to their problem statement document:
- It is highly impossible that there doesn't exist a process to monitor the current status of the customer order. It may not be formal and written, but they do have a process.
- The problems that you stated concentrates in the lack of process and disorganized forms. These are not problems directly solvable by an IS.
- Your first problem (Inaccurate order status information) is a result of a problem that leads to some business problem, and therefore should not be the highlight of the problem statement.
- Your second problem of "delay in delivery" is a business problem and therefore is correct but the information problem which causes it are not present.
- Your problem of "insufficient monitoring procedures on supplies at hand" is a valid problem but I am not comfortable using the phrase insufficient monitoring. Reading through your discussion suggests that the necessary data needed in order to track and monitor supplies and usage of supplies are not captured. The business problem with regards to this may be the increase in raw materials inventory cost affecting income of the business.
- The problems that you need to state must be in this form:
- Business Problem: What are the frequently happening situation in the business that they see as "problematic". e.g. Orders with a more urgent deadline are incorrectly scheduled, therefore not meeting its deadline.
- Information Problem: What among the five (5) Basic Information Problem do you see as the reason why the Business Problem is happening. e.g. With the number of orders and jobs (estimated at 100 per day) being scheduled, the storage in which these information doesn't allow the immediate access to the necessary information needed to determine the priority in which orders and jobs should be executed. There were also evidence that the necessary data needed to the proper scheduling of the order/jobs (as well as the determination of the status of the order) were not completely recorded.
1 Comment:
Here's a better version of the problem statement:
1. Inability to organize the route for delivery due to a big volume of data presented
There are big volumes of orders that are finished every day and this volume varies depending on the area the delivery trucks would be assigned to. Since each truck is limited to carrying only 6000 kg of the finished goods, the company cannot organize the schedule of the deliveries to various customers and which ones to prioritize first depending on the delivery route. Some trucks would be fully loaded if the assigned delivery area contains a lot of customer orders while some trucks would be carrying very small quantity only. The lack of a proper scheduling and allocation of delivery orders to their delivery trucks contributes to the problem on the delay of orders which would reach 1 to 2 days before it gets resolved that make customers more dissatisfied.
2. Information necessary to process orders on time are not available to the plant supervisor which leads to delay in production.
Management of sales data leads to delay in production, estimation of raw materials to be ordered at a given time are inaccurate since sales data is not used. Since the raw materials are not sufficient then the production of order is delayed leading to delay in distribution. There are times that needed paperwork which contains orders status are misplaced or mishandled which does not get to the supervisor immediately. Sharing of information is hard since they do not have a formal way of writing order details once it gets to the production line which then makes it hard for the plant supervisor to schedule or assign the orders for packing. Some orders take a while to pack even though it has been finished for considerable amount of time mainly because the report that the workers should fill are either misplaced, filled up late or improperly.
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