Reference no: EM132748693

Question - The BCC Construction Company of Adelaide, South Australia is a building contractor and material supplier. Its annual sales for last year were $105 million. For a number of years the firm has used computers to process transactions and prepare reports and documents. It currently employs a large mainframe computer to perform both batch and online processing. For instance, it processes most of the accounting applications, such as payroll, by the batch mode and maintains the relevant files in magnetic tape. On the other hand, it employs online processing, via terminals, to dispatch loads of materials to customers and to keep track of the status of construction projects.

Over the years the firm has developed and acquired over 150 application programs, and it maintains approximately 200 files. These programs and files are documented in a variety of styles; some documentation was prepared by programmers no longer with the firm, and some documentation was acquired from software suppliers when packages were purchased. Many of the programs have not been changed significantly in several years. According to the information systems manager, the time required to make changes is very lengthy; he has not been able to spare programmers to spend this needed time in program maintenance, since he has been "pushed" to provide new programs. For instance, he has recently supervised the writing of several new engineering and bidding programs. As a consequence, the programs tend to be inefficient and unintegrated. In addition, many of the data items appear in several files and are used in a variety of programs. Often, these data items (e.g., raw materials item numbers) are assigned a different name in each program.

The operations manager of BCC Construction Company recently raised a disturbing problem at a meeting of top managers. He complained that while he could make inquiries concerning individual projects via his terminal, he could not obtain certain reports-such as lists of overdue projects, cost overruns, and expected receipts of materials-in a timely manner. Other managers agreed that they likewise had difficulty in obtaining ad hoc demand reports from the information system. As a consequence of these comments, the president directed the controller to investigate the feasibility of moving to the database approach.

Required -

(1) What benefits would BCC Construction Company gain by moving to the database approach?

(2) What steps should be taken in the process of converting to the database approach?

(3) How would a DBMS be selected, and what are the several desirable components that it should contain?