Overview
Each modeling exercise in this course will be based on the scenario below, although each separate instruction document will provide additional information in the scenario that will be needed for each model.
Materials Required
To complete this deliverable, you will need the following materials
This document
Microsoft Word
LucidChart.com, http://draw.io, StarUML (http://staruml.io), PlantUML (http://plantuml.com), or Microsoft Visio
Scenario
The owners of a small mom and pop pizza restaurant want to improve their operation, which they hope will increase their profits. They may even want to look at the opportunity of building a franchise business in the future. The current system is almost entirely paper-based, so there is definitely room for improvement. For this exercise, the owners have contracted your employer to help them better understand their current, business process.
Initial Assessment
Your first course of action is to visit the restaurant and observe who is involved in the core business process, as well as the distinct business activities that occur.
Stakeholders
During your visit, you find the following stakeholders:
Owner/manager
Employees (Host, Wait staff, Dish washer, Cook)
Outside Suppliers
Customers
Distinct Business Activities
You also observe the following business activities:
Greeting Guests
Food Stock Preparations
Wait on Tables
Cooking
Dishwashing
Point of Sale
Management (payroll, scheduling, and inventory management)
AS-IS Business Process
After your visit, you compile the following notes regarding what you observe to be their current business process.
At the beginning of each week, management reviews the shift schedule for the week and notifies each employee what shift they have been assigned to work. Employees are then required to confirm that they are available for their assigned shift. This is often done through phone calls or in-person discussions.
At the beginning of each week, management also reviews the supply and stock inventory to ensure that there is sufficient inventory to last the week. If stock inventory is too low, management places an order with outside suppliers to have the necessary supplies and/or ingredients delivered.
At the end of each week, management reviews employee hours and applies overtime for hourly employees that work more than 40 hours in the previous week. Once wages are calculated, management uses a printed tax table to manually process the tax withholding amounts for each paycheck. Management then hand-writes and signs each payroll check, places each check in a separate envelope, and then hand delivers the checks to each employee personally.
When a customer enters the restaurant, the host greets them and shows them to their table, where they are given a menu.
The waiter arrives and writes the customer’s drink order on an order ticket, while the customer decides what they want to eat.
The waiter returns with the ordered drink, and records the customer’s food order on the order ticket.
A carbon copy of the ticket is then passed to the cook who lines it up in the order received, and then the cook prepares each order in a first-in-first-out queuing system.
o To prepare each order, the cook locates the corresponding recipe card from the recipe box, and retrieves the required ingredients as indicated on the card.
o The cook then follows the instructions on the recipe card to combine ingredients and prepare food stock.
o The cook then returns the recipe card to the recipe box, and proceeds to the next order.
The wait staff then takes the original copy of the ticket and uses a calculator (with a printer) to total the bill, item by item. They then staple the printout to the ticket and put it in a hold file, while the customer is in the restaurant.
Anything else ordered by the customer (i.e. desert) is then added to this ticket. When the customer is finished, the wait staff adds up the ticket and provides the customer a final “check.”
If the customer pays in cash, the wait staff collects the money and returns the change.
If the customer pays by credit card, the wait staff enters the card data into the system and awaits verification of sale. If the card is accepted, they then return the charge receipt to the customer for signature. If the card is declined, the wait staff return to the customer requesting another form of payment.
After the customer leaves, the wait staff cleans the table and sets the table with clean dishes, silverware, and napkins that they retrieved from the dish cabinet. The wait staff returns any dirty dishes to the dish pit, where the dish washer is responsible for cleaning them and returning the clean dishes to the dish cabinet.
Instructions
Activity diagrams allow you to transform your written notes about the current business process into a visual tool that can be used to discuss improvements with a client. This diagram of the current business process is often called the AS-IS Activity Diagram. For this first exercise, develop the AS-IS Activity diagram, based on the AS-IS Business Process described above. As you complete this exercise, keep the following in mind:
Refer to the Modeling Exercise grading rubric before you begin this exercise.
You are diagramming the “business” process, so this diagram should be technology agnostic. In other words, the actions and/or activities you include in your diagram should avoid any reference to specific technologies, like point of sale systems, calculators, or even pencil and paper.
The purpose of this diagram is to visually communicate with the client the way their current process functions. As such, your diagram should be easy to read for a non-technical person, follow correct UML syntax for activity diagrams (see the UML textbook), and include a proper title and legend (you will need to draw the legend manually, using the unique shapes used in the diagram along with a short textual description of what each shape represents).
Be sure to use swimlanes in your diagram to identify which stakeholder(s) are responsible for each action you include in the diagram.
There are no, set-in-stone solutions for this exercise. Just as in the real world, there are no off-the-shelf solutions for every IT challenge. It is not our intention to limit your creative knowledge designs.
The instructor may make suggestions or add additional requirements in the weekly announcements for each modeling exercise, so be sure to heed those suggestions as you prepare your models, or you may lose points.
