SmartCraft is a small business located in St. Peterburg that specializes in selling custom accessories for smartphones. The company sells custom designed accessories such as cases, cables, headphones, and chargers. The appeal of these products is that each accessory features
art work created by local artists in the Tampa Bay region. Through extensive advertising on social media and web search engines, SmartCraft has been able to attract a loyal following from
customers all over the world. Orders for accessories are received on SmartCraft’s website, where customers use an order form to select and pay for products. If the customer is not an existing customer, s/he must sign up to become a customer using a link on the order form. SmartCraft contracts with local artists to build the inventory of custom designed accessories and only sells accessories already in inventory. During the ordering process, the customer indicates the shipment method preferred
(USPS, UPS, or FedEx
), each of which has a different price and speed of shipment. Upon completion of the order process with successful payment, the order information is stored in a database. Although it may take up to one day to fulfill a customer’s order, it is necessary to put a “hold” on the items ordered so that another customer does not order the same items. Customers can place many sales orders, but any given sales order can relate to only one customer.
The company has five employees who are responsible for fulfilling customer orders. A newly hired employee may not have fulfilled any orders, but of course an employee can have fulfilled many orders
. The employee logs on to SmartCraft’s system, obtains a listing of orders received,
and fulfills them in a “first-in-first-out” sequence. For each order, the employee identifies the accessories ordered and put on hold, and picks and packs those accessories for shipment. Next,
the employee prepares a shipping document for the package to be shipped by either USPS, UPS, or FedEx (depending on the shipment option selected by the customer). SmartCraft has business accounts with USPS, UPS, and FedEx, and needs to keep track of the number and cost of shipments made by each.
Required
:
Prepare an REA “star pattern” diagram for the above SmartCraft scenario.
