Analysis of Business Needs and Requirements – Management Assignment Help

Assignment Task

Task 

Analysis of Business Needs and Requirements

DEFAULT SCENARIO
Little Stars operates five branches of pre-school educational facilities in Brisbane. Each branch offers high quality nursery facilities, as well as kindergarten for 150-200 children. The centre comprises of classrooms catering to children from ages 1 to 3, as along with classes for kindergarteners. Details of the key operations and processes are explained in the following sections.

Fee Payment Process:
Currently, parents are required to pay the monthly fee by visiting the office, and at times, there are long waiting queues, leading to negative customer feedback. There is also a casual day care service for parents who need care for their children during appointments, errands, or quiet time. Parents can book a slot to reserve a childcare session. Casual bookings must be paid for prior to leaving the child in the centre.

The staff complain about a high workload since they must deal with paper-based forms. The process starts with a parent filling a paper form with predefined fields (see appendix 1). On average, it takes approximately 15 minutes to fill a form. Once complete, counter staff collect the form and search for the student payment files (manually maintained), check the balance/pending payment status, calculate the applicable amount, complete the payment receipt section of the form, collect payment, and issue a payment invoice. On average, it takes 30 minutes to complete the whole process. There are two payment clerks currently handling the payments at each branch.

Staff Leave Management Process:
Teaching staff are entitled to 14 days of annual leave and 21 days of sick leave. Staff applying for leave are required to complete a leave request form (see appendix 2). Staff leave records are currently maintained by the branch HR officer on a spreadsheet. To complete the leave request form, staff must first contact the HR officer to find out their available leave. Next, they discuss availability with their colleagues and must find a suitable substitute for their role, after which they submit the form to their immediate supervisor for approval. Once approved by the supervisor, the leave request form is then submitted to the HR officer, who then forwards the completed form to the branch manager for final approval. All approved forms are scanned and emailed to the HR Manager for reporting and record keeping. 

Staff Record Management:
The centre ensures that all the teachers in the kindergarten classes are qualified and that the child caregivers are trained. At the moment, the centre has 300 employees. Staff details are recorded using a paper-based form (see appendix 3). Once completed, all records are maintained by the HR department and updated as required. Staff are expected to maintain their professional skills in teaching and child-pedagogy and to complete at least one professional development programme every six months. Any changes to staff details are handled by the HR department. A monthly staff report is prepared by the HR department for the CEO and executive management. Reports are paperbased and multiple copies are distributed across the executive management team. The report provides an overview of staff performance and issues and is used for future staff planning for the school. Given that the report is produced by the HR department monthly, the information is sometimes outdated, which can make staff planning difficult and incorrect.

Student Record Management:
All records are currently maintained manually by the teaching staff. Student assessment details are kept using spreadsheets using a standard format (see appendix 4). As part of the learning strategy used by Little Star, student performance is formally assessed every quarter. Teaching staff spend a significant amount of time preparing each student’s individual progress report. The parents are updated on their child’s progress by the teachers. At present, Little Star does not have a proper learning management system to share teaching and assessment material and to track student progress. Teachers use different online storage options (i.e., Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox) to share learning material with the students. Because of this non-standardised nature of activities, complaints from parents are gradually increasing, demanding to reduce confusion and provide a onestop solution to share learning material. Parents are also requesting for more information about their child’s daily activities to ensure they are happy and settled when in care.

Inventory Management:
Little Star maintains an inventory store at every branch. The purchasing is done by the head office’s purchasing officer. Staff are required to complete an “Inventory Request Form” (see appendix 5), get the required approval, and submit to the purchasing officer via email. Once received, the head office’s purchasing officer checks if stocks are available, and the required items are delivered to the requesting branch using a courier service. Depending on when the Inventory Request Form is approved and emailed, it may take a day or more to receive the requested items from head office. When an item requested is not in stock, a purchase order is placed with the registered suppliers. All suppliers must be approved by the Operations Manager and purchases can only be through registered suppliers. The purchasing officer updates the Inventory List (see appendix 5) as per the details provided in the “Inventory Request Forms” and regularly tracks the stock levels. However, stock tracking and ordering is not very efficient, and most of the time delivery is delayed, leading to staff dissatisfaction and complaints.

Student’s Special Arrangement:
It is important that all staff are kept informed of any special needs or requests made by the parents on a daily basis. The current process for informing the centre of any requests is done manually through the completion of a Special Request form (see appendix 6). The form is located near the front door of each room. Parent are required to provide the details of the Special Request. Requests can relate to medication, food, or exclusions from activities, to name a few examples. The completed form is handed to the child’s room leader, who reviews the form, asks questions, and signs the form to confirm its reception. The request is then noted on a general board in the room and the form is taken to the main office for filing. It is the responsibility of all teachers, staff, and carers to review the board in each room each day. Complaints have been received from parents when the request has not been fulfilled. Teachers and carers are frustrated with this system, as parents who are in a rush do not complete the form, but phone through the request later in the day. This makes food preparation difficult, and in the case of medication, the carer will then need to locate the medication in the child’s locker. Mornings are very busy in the centre, and sometimes the staff may forget to review the board for updates.

The business takes pride in the quality of the service it provides to its customers. With the current population statistics, the CEO of Little Stars maintains a positive outlook for future growth. However, she is equally worried about the ever-increasing competition, and is very keen to use technology to achieve competitive advantage. The CEO is a very tech-savvy and creative person by nature. She recently attended a seminar organised by Education Queensland where she was given demonstrations on different Learning Management Systems and Education Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERPs) and as a result, she is quite interested in modernising the operations of her organisation using technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Robotic Process Automation etc.

What you need to do
A businesses like Little Stars can make extensive use of information systems. In this assignment you are required to investigate the information needs of people at different levels of the business. This is a group assignment. You should work in groups of 3 or 4 at the most. Your group has been  commissioned by Little Stars to produce a business analysis report to the board, showing how information systems can benefit the company. The report must contain an executive summary no more than one page long.
Your report should be in the form of a conceptual solution overview with relevant business analysis. You are not required to produce any working software. You should cover examples for solutions that can help answer questions such as (but not exclusively) those listed above in the quotes e.g., strategic, tactical and operational decision making. You should include with your work a statement regarding the division of work by your group, signed by all group members. This will be used to adjust the marks of individual students as required. As a unit policy, the teaching team will not interfere any group performance issues. 

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