Decision Support System

Decision Support System



TABLE OF CONTENT

INTRODUCTION3

DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM3

PROJECT WORK4

PROJECT DEVELOPMENT5

Interactive Front End5

Income and Expenses Analysis5

Database5

Analysis of information in Excel7

CONCLUSION10

REFERENCES11

Decision Support System

Introduction

Elegant Café is a franchise company that offers franchising opportunities in the South East of England. Elegant Café runs state of the art café restaurants in several places in Hampshire namely at Brighton, Portsmouth, Reading, Southampton and Wycombe. They are a café company and offer a wide variety of coffee products, beverages, bakery items and takeaway food products. Elegant Café wants to build a decision support system that enables them to make analysis and take decisions on a wide variety of data that they possess. The project of building the decision support system was carried out by a team of three members. This paper summarizes the requirements of the Elegant Café; the project work carried out by the team and the contribution of the author (myself) to the project.

Decision Support System

Elegant Café are offering access to a national network and brand identity and are also evaluating the risk factors associated with the potential company to do business with. The company has procured information about the companies that are interested in doing business with Elegant Café and would like to decide on the less risky company to work for. The management wants the decision support system to help them in choosing a less risky company to do business with. Based on a certain set of risk variables, a credit score needs to be calculated and presented visually which would help them to zero in on the potential company. The company also has demographic information about few of the cities in South East of England and is looking forward for opening up outlets at various other locations based on a higher younger population. The Decision support system must enable the company to decide on the places in which the outlets can be opened (Andriole, S. J. 1989).

Project Work

The group assignment was performed by four members. The project work was divided into a number of components or modules and each of the members of the group worked on his component. The group also performed some tasks that required the involvement of all the members. Following were the components (Andriole, S. J. 1989):

Income and Expense Analysis and an interactive front end

Demographics Analysis and Real time information

Location Performance Analysis

Credit Score Card

The author performed the task of Income and Expense analysis and developed an interactive front end.

Project Development

Interactive Front End

Fig -1 Main Page

The above screenshot shows the main page of the decision support system. The main page was developed with an intention of reflecting the theme of Elegant Café. The main page has list of the different pages in the dashboard. The titles are hyperlinked so that clicking on any title would take to the appropriate page (Benbenishty, 1992).

Income and Expenses Analysis

Database

The Access database was used to store data on the sales revenue of the company, the operating expenses and the Cost of Goods Sold ...