Design and Implementation of Cold storage Management System

Major objective of this report is to analysis Design and Implementation of Cold storage Management System for Punarvhoba Food processing and preserves Limited. This System will update the information automatically and to make sure the availability of the updated information. In a form the information is desired by the Management, in a quick and effective order so that decisions can be made for proper and optimal business operations.

Company Profile

Background of Application Solution Ltd

Application Solution Ltd. (ASL) is professional software and reliable support service providing company working in Bangladesh market since 2000.The combination of management experience, technical experience and professional marketing resources in the promoters’ panel has led ASL for a perfect business start us in the software industry in Bangladesh.

From the very first day in the year 2000 the promoters had the vision and philosophy to create an environment within the country where the local resources in a team with their inherent intellectual and merit will produce state-of-art world-class software products for the country as well as for the international market.

With the growing need for customized software the team started growing in its number of members. At one time it was felt that an exclusive environment is required for proper research and development, for production of technology oriented software and preparing the team for software export jobs.

Infrastructure of Application Solution Ltd

ASL is located in Kawran Bazar, Dhaka. With a floor space of about 1800-sq. ft., ASL is equipped with a sound infrastructure, which is capable of supporting a modern software house.

System integration

Today’s world of globalization and specialization in products, very few companies can provide a complete range of products. Most of the companies also need the interfaces of the hardware platform with their software solutions to make their operation efficient.
We are providing expertise to integrate and implement 3rd party solutions to cater this service requirement of our clients. One of the examples is – we have integrated a hotel management solution with NEC PABX, door access system, call accounting and PMS system to make our client to best use of the IT.
Software Maintenance and Support Services

Application Solution Ltd. has providing these services in two different perspectives. First, we are providing necessary software maintenance services to our customers who have either taken our product or have done application development. With the maintenance arrangement between our customer service team and clients, we are providing 24 hours customer support. Secondly, we are also providing human clients resources as outsourced support service personnel for our clients. This has proven our to reduce their own human resources saving management time and cost in the IT department.

Consultancy Services

From our project implementation for various clients, we have found that business organizations require expertise in their IT planning including hardware, networking communication and software to improve their business efficiency. To cater the needs of our clients, we have a range of consultants who are expert in their respective operational areas. Our consultants analysis the existing system of the clients and with their business volume and scope, and then suggest the best possible but cost effective solutions in line of their future business plan.
Converge communication solutions

Unlike other local software companies, Application Solution Ltd. has specially focused on a particular area of specialization that is Converge Communication Solutions. With the expertise in working with PABX, IVR and mobile, the company is capable of creating delivering different solutions based on clients’ specific needs to improve their communication.
The company has worked with most of the major PABX brands and with IVR, it is using the worlds most reliable and industry proven Voice Card – Dialogic, a product of Intel Company. Some of the solutions that Application Solution Ltd. can offer to their customers are:

• Billing solutions
• Customer helpdesk including phone banking
• Automatic call distribution
• Telemarketing solutions
• Corporate SMS applications
• Integration of these solutions with clients’ CRM software

Hosting and registration

To meet the quality and reliable service of domain hosting and registration, we are providing such services to our clients including the reseller IT companies. These services includes from website hosting in a shared server to dedicated server depending on the need of the clients.
ASL’s domain registration policy is open and transparent to our clients and we allow our clients to transfer their domains at any time.

OBJECTIVE & METHODOLOGY

A system development process is a set of activities, methods, practices, deliverables and automated tools that stakeholders use to develop and maintain information systems and software. System development requires careful research, planning and coordination and these are essential in determining the success of any software development project. Due to the significance of the proper management of the development project, proven rules and standards are followed religiously in the software industry. These standards and methodologies ensure a smooth and hassle free software development life cycle.

Objectives

All software projects start by identifying a clear objective or goal. Objective of this project was to implement Coldstorage Management System (CMS) for the Punarvhoba Food Processing and preserve Ltd. Looking at the problems posed by the existing system of Coldstorage, the objective can be sum up as follows to develop a Coldstorage Management System for efficiently and effectively store all information related to different payments, loan, operational advance etc.

• Allow the Management to easily access that information as necessary.
• Less Documentation and Faster working performance and thus saving times.
• The System will update the information automatically and to make sure the availability of the updated information.
• In a form the information is desired by the Management, in a quick and effective order so that decisions can be made for proper and optimal business operations.

Methodology

For this internship project typical phases of the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is followed. This author took the Traditional System Development (TSD) approach for the software development the structured system analysis and design. It is based on functional decomposition through which the major activities of the system were identified. The specific methodologies employed for the different software development stages are stated below:

• Preliminary Investigation
• System Analysis
• System design
• Programming
• Testing

PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION

Introduction

This chapter provides a brief narration of Preliminary Investigation that is the first phase of system development process. From this chapter, the perceiver problems, opportunities and directives that triggered the project can be defined. Here the risk of pursuing the project was also assessed. This chapter begins with preliminary requirements, which is helpful to get specific requirements for the next stage. This chapter also includes reason for designing the system; schedule the project and some constraints of the project.

Preliminary Requirements

Coldstorage Management System always tries to give better services to customer. Actually they are always commitment to customer for better service. Any time can be needed any information about customer, product and so on. In file based system it is difficult to retrieve this information in a short time. This is time consuming. Now-a-days they have so many customers. So it is difficult to keeping this information in file based system. They need an information system so that they can give better service to customer. Coldstorage Management System is an automated system in where customer orders information, invoice information will be stored. Customer comes to Coldstorage for preserve his product. Then an employee receives this product and generates a invoice and will give this invoice to customer. As this the preliminary investigation, all the processing steps of Coldstorage have not broadly described here. In the requirement analysis part, all processes are described.

Preliminary Constraints:

Coldstorage Management System use file-based system. That’s why they are facing various problems.

The problems they face are:

• When they have to make order report, they face tremendous trouble to combine the different data.
• When they need to know about customer information, they have to find out it in file-based system. This is time consuming.
• When higher Management need report .Then they have to find out so huge documents, number of files to search from. This is very difficult to maintain.
• Extra overload work, extra manpower needed.
• Sometimes they face data redundancy problems
• If useful paper and important documents are lost then they face various problems.

SYSTEM ANALYSIS

Introduction

System Analysis refers to the process of studying an existing business system whether manual or automated and its working environment and assessing its efficiency to meet the business organization’s needs. It is the process of gathering and interpreting facts, diagnosing problems in the existing system, defining these problems, recognizing their causes and finally recommending improvements to the system. Through the proper execution of the fact-finding techniques described earlier, the system was understood and its requirements were analyzed.

This project’s System Analysis phase was divided into the following component phases:

• Problem Analysis
• Requirement Analysis
• Decision Analysis
• Feasibility Study

Problem Analysis

Problem analysis is to understand the current problem of the organization and analyzing them.

The Existing Manual System

As it has been mentioned earlier in the preliminary investigation part, that Coldstorage are maintaining a manual system for keeping various information. Coldstarage are using package software like MS Excel, MS Word for storing the Customer information and employee information information. However, it is not the solution of their problems. So it can be said that the system is a manual file based system. The system is responsible to maintain all the financial transactions including customer order, loan related transaction like employee loan etc. The system is also responsible to maintain all the payment information as the system is file-based system; they do not have any automated report generation process. As the information is on papers, employees face problems when they look for different information as a whole. It takes a long time to combine the data from separate places and to find out the necessary information when they are searching data manually. For example if they want to search the duration that is How much time products are stored in Coldstorage, they do not have a smooth way to find this information.

The Proposed System

• Major problem of the existing system is the data separation as they keep Monthly data in separate files which will not remain in the new system.
• The proposed system keeps all the data in a single relational database which solves the problem.
• The proposed system has a report generator which generates reports for a Specific period of time.
• The proposed system has customized search option from which they can easily View any information.

• To build the system with security consideration.
• The proposed system is user friendly.
• To make the system easily maintainable so that the users of the system can handle the system easily and effortlessly.

System Improvement Objectives

• Smooth identification of the sales info and payment info.
• Checking all receivable and payable amounts without the hassle of huge data handling.
• Computer generated different kinds of voucher and invoice.
• Identifying all the loans (advance salary, operational advance) given to the different employees.
• Identification of loans taken by the company.
• Identification of cash withdraws from the bank.
• Generate the year-end reports about the total monetary transaction.

Requirement Analysis

A system’s Requirement Analysis is an important component of the system development process. It is the stage for defining and prioritizing business requirements. This is perhaps the most important and essential ingredient of the system analysis phase and its proper completion ensures the success of the entire system. It establishes what the new system must do, it involves identifying who needs what information, where, when and how. It also identifies the Data, Process and Interface requirements for the users of the new system. Errors and omissions in requirement analysis result in user dissatisfaction with the final system and it will force to be highly cost and incur heavily loss. The ultimate goal of the Requirement Analysis is the creation of the Requirement Specification for the new System. An important factor in the creation of the Requirement Specification is that it should have both the acceptable facilities that the existing system has as well as have solutions for the existing system’s flaws. At this stage, this author tried to find out the requirements of the proposed system in details. It was found out what are the main steps performed, how and where performed, what is the key requirement for building such a system, what are the constraints, how data flow occurs, what is the input of each process and what are the outputs. It is also found out whether the proposed system would be feasible or not, what will be user requirements, report requirements.

Functional Requirements

The steps performed in the Coldstorage are explained below:

Order Receiving

Input: Customer comes to Coldstorage for preserve his foods. So, customer gives product details to employee, customer information, order information and payment information.

• Customer Id
• Order Info
• Payment
• Payment Date
• Product Details

Process: In order receiving process, customer, order and payment information are stored in database. Employee gets a confirmed order from process.

Output: Clients gets a order confirmed information.

Invoice generating process

Input: Employee gives customer’s order information for invoice generation. Product information and payment information can be get from database Customer also can gives advance payment or full payment.

• Customer Id
• Order Id
• Payment Id
• Advance Payment
• Due Payment
• Product Info

Process: In the process employee select service price for preserve product. Then employee checks whether customer gives full payment or advance payment. If the customers make any advance payments then employee recorded it. Employee selects a delivery date. All the information of the invoice is recorded in the invoice db.

Output: Customer gets a invoice.

Order delivery process:

Input: Customer gives invoice to employee.

• Order Id
• Customer Id
• Payment Info

Process: In this process employee verify Customer Id whether this customer is valid or not. Employee also verifies order information. If customer is valid then employee asks for payment if customer has any due payment. Then customer pays the due amount.

Output: Customer gets a delivery confirmation.

Shipment

Input: Customer can request for shipment. For shipment Customer gives shipment info and invoice info.

• Shipment Id
• Invoice Id

Process: In this process shipment info and invoice info are verified.

Output: Ship products to customer. 

Customer Loan Process:

Input: Customer gives loan application, property information and product information. If customer wants to loan then they can get loan by his property or by his Product which is stored in Coldstorage.

• Customer Id
• Product Id
• Property Id

Process: In this Loan process top management verifies customer’s property information and product information. If al of this information is valid then top management approve customer’s loan.

Output: Customer gets loan amount

Consumption process:

Input: Employee gives Consumption information such as water and power information which is used in Coldstorage for calculation this consumption.

Process: In consumption process employee calculates total water used and total power used for the Coldstorage.

Output: Total Price for consumption used.

Report Generation process.

Input: Employee generates report for the manager by giving product, order and consumption, delivery, invoice information.

Process: Management report.

Output: They make a voucher for the cash withdraw; type of the voucher is Cash Receive Voucher. All related information is recorded in voucher including amount, account information etc. They keep a copy of the voucher.

Non-functional requirements:

Non-functional requirement contains important issues of quality and restrictions for software system. This is a subject requirement since it can be interpreted and evaluated differently by different people. This can also be interacting, since the satisfaction of a particular non-function requirement can help the achievement of other non-functional requirements.

Security requirement 

The Coldstorage Management System will have the security feature. The software will be fully password protected. We design security control as follows. First of all in the Coldstorage Management System there is a login screen to access main Manu of different activities. At that screen customer will provide his login and password. Then it will check login and password. If ok, then customer will be able to access main page with the menu of different operations.

Safety Requirements:

Safety of information is also a priority of any institution. Our system plans to deal with safety measures following different approaches. The system will back up its database and user preference everyday. In addition to backing up alternate copies of the database, tape backup will be deployed to avoid hard disk failures and malfunctions. On top of that, a daily printout of all information and reports are stored physically in file cabinets. Data loss can also due to power loss. Uninterrupted power supply (UPS) units must be deployed to protect data from such scenarios.

Performance Requirements

Where are these steps performed?

The above- mentioned processes are performed in different zones of Coldstorage. The first three steps Order receiving, Invoice generation and delivery will be performed in the front desk of the coldstorage. The rest of the steps are performed in the management department.

Who performs these steps?

Employee performs all this steps.

How long do these steps take?

How long these steps take is depend on customer. Customers come to Coldstorage and tell the employee for preserve his product.

How often is it done?

These depend on Customer order. Whenever customer comes to Coldstorage for preserve his product employees of Coldstorage takes this product and generate an invoice. This can be two times or many.

How great is the volume of the transaction?

This is depending on how many customers comes to Coldstorage for preserve his product.

Who uses the resulting information?

• The resulting information mainly uses Manager. From the resulting information
• They can observe the customer information and what type of problems are faced.
• Preliminary Constraints

Preliminary Constraints:

• Documents are not secured because of manual system.
•  Documents are very large in size because these documents are stored in paper base file.
• If any information needed related to loan then it should be find out manually. So this is time consuming.
• Stake of files that is very difficult to maintain.
• The system is manual so they need extra manpower, so more expenses is needed in every step to manage all of these.
• Loan related calculations are complicated that’s why error can occur easily.
• At Coldstorage all the works of invoice generation are done by manually. So data inconsistency and misleading information are frequent phenomena. So, most often the high level manager makes mistake of taking strategic decision.

Safety Requirements

The system should provide mechanism that will backup the data incase of system failure. For this purpose Employee will backup all the data every week. It is also recommended to make a backup once in a month. This mechanism will be provided in the user interface of the system. There has different login for different employee and has different password for different employee. Moreover, they will also keep the printed version of all the reports and vouchers.

Decision Analysis

How much of the system should be computerized?

Entire system should be computerized to perform all processes efficiently. As head office performs all the monetary transactions, all the processes should be computerized. This will ensure accurate information.

Make it web based?

As the system will only run at Coldstorage, for this time being the system may not be web based. But near future the system may be a web based. The project team was assigned to develop the system as a client server application.

What other emerging IT can be used?

For this time being it is not decided what other emerging IT can be used to improve the performance of the system.

Feasibility Study

A feasibility study has been done to determine whether the proposed system can be possible or achievable from a organizational, economical, technical and operational perspective. This feasibility study illustrates whether the proposed system can improve the organization’s objective, mission. It also find out whether the proposed system is a good investment, whether the technology needed for the system is available and can be handled by the organization’s employees. The study also verifies whether the employees can handle the alteration introduced by the new system.

Organizational Feasibility

This solution would somehow make the transaction with buyers and suppliers more rapidly as it will reduce most of the protracted cross office transactions with the help of the new system. The Company’s vision, mission and objectives are to emphasize on the first-rate services leading to growth of the company imbibed with good governance. With this system, the company should improve their quality of service and it would be feasible for the organization.

Economical Feasibility

Now a day’s most of the organizations are interested to include IT in their business. Coldstorage are also interested to use different software to increase their business performance. As they want to use these types of systems in various sectors, they are ready to invest. The proposed system will reduce the work pressure and processes can be done fast. So, it is also economically feasible.

Technical Feasibility

The whole system will be automated and the shared databases will be constantly updated by the terminal users. Necessary hardware and tools are available for this. Also in local market computers are available at low price. Proper technically sound people are also available and they are able to use such a database system. Software Resources will provide all the necessary software tools within the price of the system. The proposed system is therefore technically feasible.

Operational Feasibility

As for operational purposes, the controlling system with the help of automated techniques will be more efficient. With this way, the company can maintain paper-based information system for recording purpose, as they are maintaining now. The company is maintaining computer records and there are data entry experts in the company. So, there no difficulty for training people to use the new system. The new system will remove overloads of work for most of the employees who are part of the existing system. The new information system is developed in such a way that it’s not going to hamper the organizational power of any employee. As now they have more control over the data so the employees will welcome the new system. A solution like this will definitely help them in performing their task efficiently. So from the organization’s cultural and political perspective, it is believed that the automated system will be accepted.

SYSTEM DESIGN

System Design refers to the reconstructing of the components and the functions identified during the System Analysis phase to produce the backbone of the software product. The goal of the system design phase is

• Determining which system components will cover which requirements in the system specification, and

• How these system components will work together.

The design phase is concerned with technology-based views of the system’s Data, Process and Interfaces. The system was designed with the aim of fulfilling the requirements identified in the System Analysis phase. For this project Logical Design and Physical Design was employed.

Logical Design

Logical design lays out the components of the system and their relationship to each other, as they would appear to users. This specific system logically designed using Process Modeling by Data Flow Diagrams (DFD) and Data Modeling by Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) techniques.

 Process Modeling

Process modeling shows the overall activities of the organization by providing graphical representations of the system functions of the organization. Data Flow Diagrams (DFD) is one of the most powerful and useful techniques available to the system analyst. It graphically represents the information system. This means it shows all the incoming data, processing of data and finally output destination of the information.

Context Level DFD

Context level DFD for the proposed ‘Coldstorage Management System” is given below:

Data Modeling                       

Basically a database system is a computerized record-keeping system. It is regarded as a kind of electronic filing cabinet i.e., it is repository or container for a collection of computerized data files. Entity-Relationship Model (E-R Model) is a very functional tool for modeling the entities and their relationship in real world entities. So, the help of ERD was taken to model the data requirements of Integrated Coldstorage Management System.

Data Dictionary is the following tool after the ERD which contains the description of all the attributes and fields of the ERD. The Data Dictionary is attached in the Appendix A

Logical Entity Relationship Diagram

TESTING

Introduction

After completion of designing phase, the software entered into testing phase. Testing is one of the most important parts of any database software developing phases. It is also very important feature of any data entry system. Testing is done to find the errors or any kind of invalid input.

Objective of Testing in This Project 

The testing is performed for the below purposes:

• To uncover potential errors and bug entry in the software.
• To check the invalid entries or inputs by the end user.
• To avoid the illegal operations and illegal inputs those can be harmful to the software or future processing for report generation.

Steps Performed for Testing

• The inputs are defined and identified at first.
• Test environment requirements (hardware, software, communications, etc.) are determined.
• Test approaches and methods – unit, integration, functional, system, load, usability tests, etc. have been determined
• Application’s higher-risk aspects have been identified, priorities are set, and scope and limitations of tests are determined.
• Requirements, functional design, and internal design specifications and other necessary documents have been obtained.
• Input test data domain have been identified
• Evaluation is done and reports are submitted.
• Unhandled errors and bugs are recoded and notification is sent to project manager.
• The testing cycle went on until final approve came from software manager.

Testing Levels

There are three test levels –

• Unit Test
• System Test and
• Acceptance test

In this project only Unit Testing is performed broadly.

CONCLUSION

Internship Program gives the students an opportunity to prove their knowledge and confidence; however the time limits are a key problem to face the real world challenge for the first time. The short time Internship was really a pleasant and thrilling experience. This experience surely will be a cherished momentum at the beginning of building a carrier.

Coldstorage Management System was chosen as the internship project since it provided the opportunity of working in a professional Software Development environment with a group of experienced IT professionals. Successful ‘Software Development’ is a proper blend of standard development practices, proper theoretical knowledge and the developers’ creativity. In doing this project, this author tried to follow, to the best of his abilities, the proven methods, tools, techniques and standards of successful software development that were taught at IUB as well as those that were advised by the software developers at Application Solution Limited. Overall, this author believes all the software development phases were completed satisfactorily and the project was well planned. After working in a real-life project, this author has grown a new esteem and appreciation for this line of work.

As a student of IUB author has done many classes for last four years and also have done numerous class projects. But this project taught him that class project is far more different than a real life project especially in approach. Any project contains a level of uncertainty and ambiguity, which is the most challenging aspect in real-world application. The project was started without having any idea what exactly this author had to deal with. As talking to users, he came across contradictions, indecisions, and bewilderment over terms and goals. However, problems were resolved using the previous experience and discussion with the faculty supervisor and field supervisor.

This author sincerely hopes that the hard work and dedication that he has given to this project is appreciated and rewarded by all concerned and any shortcomings on his part will be decently overlooked.

Lastly, the outcome of internship project is not just a product or report it is more than that. Here how to work in professional environment with challenges in the real development world, how to improve coding and design techniques and how to cope with different working situations were learned. Throughout the whole development process, this author got the chance to implement his theoretical knowledge of computer science he learnt over last 4 years into practice. Not only that, through report writing this author got to know how to compose professional and formal reports for any project or research works. These will help him a lot in future not only while working in industries but also in higher studies. Lastly, again this author is grateful to Independent University, Bangladesh for giving him this prospect to conduct his internship.