Ex-26

1. Choose ONE of the four ways to manage and develop integrated system as listed below in the study guide.

I choose business process analysis.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a way to integrate the data and processes of an organization into one single system. Usually ERP systems will have many components including hardware and software, in order to achieve integration, most ERP systems use a unified database to store data for various functions found throughout the organization.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an information industry term for methodologies, software, and usually Internet capabilities that help an enterprise manage customer relationships in an organized way. Many organizations turn to CRM software to help them manage their customer relationships. CRM technology is offered on-premise, on-demand or through Software as a Service (SaaS) CRM, depending on the vendor. Recently, mobile CRM and the open source CRM software model have also become more popular(Eric Williams (2008).

Workflow management

Workflow management is a system of overseeing the process of passing information, documents, and tasks from one employee or machine within a business to another. Through proper workflow management, each of these employees or machines will pass the work on according to a predetermined procedure. As technology advances, much workflow management has become automated and takes advantage of special software to make the process much smoother.

Workflow management is an important component of a business for a variety of reasons. The primary advantage to workflow management is improved efficiency within the business. By automating many of the processes within a business and establishing a procedure that is consistently followed, unnecessary steps are eliminated, and every member of the team is fully aware of his or her responsibilities.

Workflow management also makes it easier to track employee and machine performance. When a link in the chain is broken, it is simple to go back and determine where this occurred. In addition, workflow management serves to standardize working methods, ensuring that every employee working on the same level is performing the same function.

2. Summarize your understanding and describe its relevance (250 words max) in either your study at university or in your work environment.

I have worked with many companies who has implemented and using ERP systems in their companies to run their business. One of the main company I would like to mention here is Kalani cables Pvt Ltd. Working as a networking administrator for this company have brought a good understanding that how an ERP system improves efficiency and change working culture of an organization.

ERP system in this company is particularly used to manage its island wide sales and payments. All the remote sales agent has access to this via a mobile connecting devices and when ever a sale is made it cab be updated to the main server at the head office. Once it’s updated the transaction will be automatically forwarded to the accounts department and the balances will update automatically. Each department functions are included in the system and each point is linking to another point, form the whole supply chain. Base on the transactions of SCM, it can calculate and generate various reports for management decision.

HR system is also integrated with the system and functions are running separately. HR system can manage employees working status, such as annual leaves, attendance records, and other data.

ERP system integrates most systems of an organization. In the unified database and data warehouse database, which contains all data, we may track the transactions one by one when any problem happens.

Reference

Tech-FAQ. n.d.. What is ERP? Retrieved on May 29, 2009 from
http://www.tech-faq.com/erp.shtml

Eric Williams. 2008. CRM. Retrieved on May 29, 2009 from http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid11_gci213567,00.html

Workflow Management (n.d.), Retrived on May 29, 2009 from http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-workflow-management.htm

Ex-25

1. What is meant by a location based service?

Location based services (LBS) are services making use of the position of an information devices such as a mobile phone or smartphone. The following is an exammple of LBS.

Global Positioning System (GPS) using the signals received by satellites.

2. Visit an airline website and search for information on WAP or SMS access to booking airline, and do the same for a banking website. How do both industries compare ?

I visited www.airasia.com one of the famous airline reservation website and www.combank.lk a well reputed bank in sri lanka for its customer service and found that the both industries have enabled support via SMS.

I could find a difference in the banking site where the user is asked to pre resister for the use of SMS banking facility , where the airline industry wont require pre registration but required the ticket booking number to track the records.

Both site services having a pre standard codes need to be entered with the type of service to derive the relevant information.

Refferece ;

MobileIN.com (n.d.) Location-based services.  Retrieved April 29, 2008 from http://www.mobilein.com/location_based_services.htm.

www.airasia.com, www.combank.lk

Ex-24

1. Differentiate the various types of software agents.

Intelligent software agents
The design of intelligent software agents is a branch of artificial intelligence research. Capabilities of intelligent agents include ability to adapt the environment and reconfiguring in response. This can be achieved through the choice of alternative problem-solving-rules or algorithms, or through the discovery of problem solving strategies. Adaptation may also include other aspects of an agent’s internal construction, such as recruiting processor or storage resources.
It also has the ability to learn through trial-and-error, it implies a capability of introspection and analysis of behavior and success.

Distributed agents
Since agents are well suited to include their required resources in their description, they can be designed to be very loosely coupled and it becomes easy to have them executed as independent threads and on distributed processors. Thus they become distributed agents and the considerations of distributed computing apply. Agent code is particularly easy to implement in a distributed fashion and should scale well.

Mobile agents
With mobile agent, the agent code moves by itself, including its execution state, on to another machine, to continue execution there. Agents can be used to gather system information, taking back-up of files by copying them in client-server paradigm, monitoring network throughput or to check resources availability and moderating the resource utilization of system by checking the services running on system.

Multi-agent systems
Several agents may form a multi-agent system. A multiple-agent system will not have all data or all methods available to achieve an objective and thus will have to collaborate with other agents. Also, there may be little or no global control and thus such systems are sometimes referred to as swarm systems. As with distributed agents, data is decentralized and execution is asynchronous.

Software agents
Agents, which carry out tasks relating to new updates for existing system, downloading and installing the updates when received.

Fuzzy agents
In computer science a fuzzy agent is a software agent that implements fuzzy logic. This software entity interacts with its environment through an adaptive rule-base and can therefore be considered as a type of intelligent agent

Stock agents
Software agents which carry out tasks relating to stock transactions including notifying you when the stock price reaching a preset price by e-mail or sms, providing updated technical analysis based on the latest market situations or maintaining the stock portfolio and giving warning signals when the portfolio is under performed.

References:
Jeffrey M. Bradshaw , An Introduction to Software Agents retrieving on May 29, 2009 from
http://agents.umbc.edu/introduction/01-Bradshaw.pdf

Software agent, retrived may 29, 2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent

2.  Describe how techniques such as artificial intelligence and statistical techniques are used in software agent.

The intelligent agent can be programmed for the users’ aim, targets and preference with artificial intelligence.  For example, a intelligent agent can be programmed with artificial intelligence to assist the users to search a specific type, model and color of car in the Internet including the negotiation on the price and closing the deal as well.  Alternatively, the intelligent agent can just source the cars available in the Internet meeting the users’ requirement leaving the user to make the final decision.

Mobile agents are programmed with statistical techniques to enable them to monitor the network situation and utilization of system resources.

3. Identify various activities in e-commerce where software agents are currently in use.
Commerce agents: Software agents which mediates between two companies having a business relationship.

Data management agents:Software agents carrying out tasks with corpora of data such as processing text from websites and producing summary with associated keywords.

Government agents: Software agents carrying out activities associated with government such as search government regulations, policies and statistics etc..

News agents: Software agents concerning tasks associated with web-based news services.

Shopping agent: it automatically updates the request information regarding products which customer is interested from e-commerce site.

Refference;

Wikimedia. (2009). Software agent. Retrieved May 29, 2009 from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent.

Ex-23

1. What is a spider? What does it do?

Spider is a program that automatically fetches web pages. It is also named as Web Crawler. It is used to feed pages to search engines. It’s called a spider because it crawls over the Web. Because most web pages contain links to other pages, a spider can start almost anywhere. As soon as it sees a link to another page, it goes off and fetches it.

Large search engines, like Google,yahoo have many spiders working in parallel.

Reference:Spider. Retrieving on 16 May 2009 from http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/s/spider.html

2. What is a meta-search engine? Provide some examples.

Meta-search engine is a search engine, which would pass the search requests to various popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and  etc , simultaneously for processing. Results from each search engines would be consolidated and presented to the client grouped by their search criteria.

Eg :

Dogpie www.dogpile.com, Mama www.mamma.com and Limewire www.limewire.com

3.  How can you get your site listed at major search sites; and how could you improve your site ranking?

• Add the website to famous search engines by paying the annual subscribtions.
• Add some key words to the main page.

To improve site in the rankings site should use meaningful headings to their web pages.

minimizing broken links , and increasing quality of sublinks in the webpages would improve site performance and may increase the rankings of the site.

Reference;

Berkeley, UC. (2008). Meta-search engines. Retrieved May 29, 2009 from http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/MetaSearch.html.

Heng, C. (n.d.) How to improve your search engine ranking on Google. Retrieved May 29, 2009 from http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/google.shtml.

Ex-22

1. Differentiate between software systems such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, Business-to-Business e-commerce program and Supply-Chain Management software (SCM). are performing different functionalities in company-wide environment.

Customer Relationship Management software

CRM software is a software system designed to analyze the customers’ preference, spending pattern, needs, market trends based on the customer data collected. Based on these analysis, the company would understand the customers’ need better, the present market situation and the future market trends which enable the company to formulate their company’s short-term and long-term strategies and operation modes to suit the current market situation and to meet the market trends to the best interest of the companies.  With CRM, the parties involved are the customers and the company itself.

Business to Business e-commerce program

Business-to-Business e-commerce program is software which automates processes or commerce transactions between businesses by using electronic. With B2B, the companies involved require negotiation and integration to enable communication between the companies for the business transaction. B2B program builds and improves the relationship between companies and business partners.

Supply chain management software

SCM is a application system to help company to improve various company business operations including plan and managing the company resources, sourcing the suppliers for supplying the raw material, scheduling manufacturing activities, formulating the delivery operation and strategies, providing customer supports including collection of defective goods from customers.  Basically SCM is a application system mainly to improve the internal operations of the company with a view to reduce product costs, operation costs, production costs and improving customer services.

Reference;

Customer relationship management. Retrieved on May 29, 2009 from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_management.

Darwin Publications. (n.d.) Business to business – Overview.  Retrieved May 29, 2009 from http://www.netessence.com.cy/downloads/b2b.pdf.

Worthen, B. (2007). ABC: An introduction to supply chain management. Retrieved may 29, 2009 from http://www.cio.com/article/print/40940.

Ex-21

1. Class diagram of Shopping Cart

Refference ;

Shoping Cart Diagram, Retrived May 29,2009 from

http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_models/uml_class_diagram_for_shopping_cart/index.htm