Reference no: EM132093854

Question: Pacific Green Company (PGC) provides landscaping services to individual and corporate customers in southern California. Heather F originally founded PGC as a lawn mowing service while she attended graduate school. It became so successful that she delayed her teaching career to concentrate on building the company. This case describes PGC's landscaping jobs (sales) process.

After the customer contacts PGC about a landscaping project, a PGC manager prepares a quote describing the scope of service and the price. After reviewing the quote and comparing PGC's quote to other landscapers, customers may 1) accept the quote, 2) notify PGC that they did not get the job, or 3) request that the quote be modified. If the customer accepts the quote, they sometimes request that the project be completed in a series of jobs. Each job is handled separately. Jobs are then performed according to an agreed upon schedule until the overall project is complete.

Each landscaping job generally proceeds as follows after the contract for the job is signed. The PGC manager responsible for the quote assigns the trucks and selects the plants for the job. Then, the manager assigns the job team: the job supervisor, truck drivers, and landscaping laborers, to the job. At that point, the PGC job team performs the job. Customers must pay a 10% deposit when the job begins (that payment is made when they sign the job contract) and the final 90% is due when the job is completed. Customer payments are made by check or credit card and processed for daily deposit by a PGC cashier. After PGC starts the job, the cashier bills the customer for remaining 90% due. Customers either make the final payment or demand rework to bring the job up to the contract requirements. When the job is completed satisfactorily, the customers then pay the amount due. Occasionally, some deadbeat customers withhold further payment for unknown reasons. In that case, PGC either refers the debt to a collection agency or writes off the remainder of the amount due. Of course, PGC does not perform the remainder of the jobs in the project when the customer fails to pay.

PGC maintains an inventory of trucks of all sizes to support various landscaping requirements (the acquisition of trucks are outside the scope of this case). PGC tracks the trucks by vehicle identification numbers (VINs) and keeps meticulous records on each truck. For example, they track the mileage for each truck on each landscaping job. Additionally, they track the maintenance history for each truck (maintenance is outside the scope of this case). Each type of truck has a different use and hauling capacity, but each truck in a particular truck type has the same use and hauling capacity.

PGC also maintains an extensive inventory of plants, ranging from colorful flowers to large trees, so they can address almost any landscaping requirement on short notice. Since the common name of many plants vary by region, PGC tracks its plant inventory by scientific names (i.e., the Latin names). To manage the plant inventory and ensure that the best plants are applied to job conditions, Heather categorizes all plants by plant type.

PGC performs landscaping jobs for individual and corporate customers. Before performing any job, Heather prepares a quote describing the scope of service and the price. Sometimes, the customer will elect to perform pieces of the overall quote, so one quote may result in several landscaping jobs. The landscaping quote presents a price estimate based on the types of plants and types of trucks required and the overall time involved. Each quote involves at least one truck type and one plant type.

PGC tracks landscaping jobs by job #. Each landscaping job may require many plants and several trucks. PGC typically assigns multiple employees to each job as follows: (1) one supervisor, (2) one truck drivers per truck, and (3) landscaping laborers. PGC specifically tracks which employees perform which of these functions on specific jobs, since they pay employees according to the work performed on each landscaping job. Customer payments are made by check or credit card and processed for daily deposit by a PGC cashier.

PGC keeps all employee information together (your model should show one Employee class). They track each employeeâ€^TMs qualifications according to category: purchasing agent, cashier, landscaping laborer, truck driver, supervisor, etc. An employee is considered qualified when he or she reaches the number of training hours required for that category. However, each employee can hold qualifications for several categories, for example an employee qualified as a purchasing agent could also be qualified as a truck driver.

PGC runs the business operations on paper-based. Recently, PGC is considering to create a new information system that can fulfil the functions. Now you are hired as a consultant to help them to design the system.

1: Using the description above, prepare a BPMN activity diagram with pools (customer and PGC) and swimlanes (departments) that accurately depicts the PGC sales process.

2: Use the information above to draw an Entity-Relationship diagram showing the classes, associations, and multiplicities.

3: Prepare a listing of the tables necessary to support PGCâ€^TMs process using all the attributes. Name each table and clearly identify primary keys with PK and foreign keys with FK. List your tables in the following order: RESOURCES, EVENTS, AGENTS, and LINKING. Identify the attributes from the narrative description.

4: Identify three potential threats in the process and three control procedures that can address and mitigate the threats.

5: Prepare the query design or SQL statement that can generate the query results for the following questions:

A: How many services that the customer have ordered?

B: For landscaping job #1, what are the plants and trucks that the job #1 requires?