SDLC for a Private Gas Station



SDLC for a Private Gas Station

Introduction

This project is intended for developing computerized inventory management system for a private gas station. The gas station under consideration has four branches situated in Dallas. With the increasing advancements in information systems, the management of gas station is interested for using state-of-art and more sophisticated information technology tools and information systems for improving efficiency of Inventory Management systems, located at all of their branches. Currently the gas station depends on the manual data entry systems for most of its business and operation processes, including sales, order placement and inventory management. The use of computers and information system solutions will improve the efficiency of the human elements of the company. It is proposed to integrate the inventory management system with the sales information system, so that the employees would be able to monitor the position of inventory in their branch, at any given instant.

This paper proposes the steps of System Development Life Cycle for developing an effective inventory management system. SDLC is chosen for developing the system as this approach has sufficient capability to support the planning, analysis, designing, implementation and testing of the system.

System Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

SDLC provides an organized way for developing an implementing information system solution. Mostly the methodologies of SDLC follow a sequential list of steps, in which output of each step becomes the input of next step (Kay, 2012). The major phases of SDLC include the investigation phase, systems analysis phase, system design phase, implementation phase, and finally the integration and testing phase. In the next sections of paper, these phases are discussed briefly.

Investigation Phase

Before starting working on any information system project, the first phase is to investigate the requirements of the project, and observe the current working conditions and environment. It is also essential to observe the data input, storage and output processes. This becomes particularly important if the company has been using manual systems in the past, and the purpose of SDLC is to transform the older manual information systems into computerized information systems.

In order to execute the investigation phase for the project of a private gas station under consideration, the managers and employees working at all the branches would be interviewed in order to collect the required information. The main purpose of the investigation phase is to understand the current inventory management process and information processing tasks for all the branches. The system to be developed would be thoroughly discussed with the key managers, staff members, and employees. The comments from the employees would be welcome about the new system development, and they would also be invited for making suggestion about the project. This information would provide significant help in the later stages of the project development; as this information needs to be integrated in the computerized inventory management system. In addition, the investigation phase will be of essential help in making the project successful as the dialog between the system developers and the employees will remain continued throughout ...