Electrical World - A Case Study in Analysis Techniques

This case study is presented in summary form. It is used as background text to support the development of Context and Data Flow Diagrams in those topic areas. It is NOT comprehensive and many assumptions have been made when developing the associated diagrams.

The case study summary is as follows:

• rent out electrical appliances;
• sell appliances on hire purchase;
• carry out maintenance on appliances they rent out or sell;
• on every 5th maintenance job on an appliance, it is taken to a service depot and a replacement is loaned to the customer - the replacement must be an allowable one (if you have a 12" black and white TV, your replacement set will not be a 26" colour);
• sales offices are dotted throughout the country and there is a hierarchy of sales offices (ordinary offices report to town offices, town offices report to area offices, area offices report to sub-regional offices, sub-regional offices report to regional offices, regional offices report to head office);
• when a person rents an appliance for the first time from a particular sales office they become a customer of that office;
• a customer only deals with one sales office;
• if, for example, a customer moves house, they cancel their existing dealings and rent afresh from an office nearer to the new house;
• a person can remain a customer (for example for promotional mailing purposes) even though they do not currently rend an appliance;
• a customer is allocated to a service depot, depending on where the customer lives, all maintenance and repair work is carried out by that depot;
• stock can be held at various locations;
• when carrying out a scheduled maintenance job, a service engineer can also carry out unscheduled jobs e.g. 'I'm here to fix the sound on your TV, but I'll also fix the tuning on your video'.

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