AIS655 Accounting System Analysis & Design MARCH - JULY 2021

FACULTY OF ACCOUNTANCY
UNIVERSITI TEKNOLOGI MARA

ACCOUNTING SYSTEM
ANALYSIS & DESIGN
AIS 655

PROBLEM BASED LEARNING

SEMESTER MARCH -JULY 2021

PREPARED BY

TENGKU FAIRUZ TENGKU EMBONG

MOHAMAD RIDHUAN MAT DANGI (Ts.)
SHAZALINA MOHAMED SHUHIDAN (Dr)

REVISED BY

NORHASNAH M. SAHEH

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DATA MANAGEMENT AND ANALYSIS

You and your friends, Mohd Shukri and Mohd Syafie decided to start a business after
graduating from UiTM. Mohd Shukri has been appointed as the business’ General Manager,
with Mohd Syafie in charge of Sales and Marketing. Since you have an accounting background,
the business has appointed you as the Head of Accounting department which responsible to
oversee the business’ accounts, supervise your department staff, and advice the management
to adopt recent technological resources that suitable for later business improvement strategies
and future returns. Your first business was a small trading firm that sold few products from a
rented store in Puchong. Ten employees were hired, three sales representatives, two to stock
the shelves, three checkout clerks and two to develop and maintain the electronic storefront.
The business pursued a clicks-and-bricks strategy. The products can be purchased in-store or
delivered to customers after they place an order over the phone or through the e-mail. After a
few months, the products were also available for purchase on the business’ website.

After three years in operation, the business becomes very successful, with five stores and a
popular website. However, as the business grew, Mohd Syafie and his sales team faced
significant challenges due to the large volume of data stored and they are increasingly receiving
requests for different data analyses to better estimate sales over future periods. These requests
require the team combining disparate data sets.

Mohd Syafie perceives that the business’ data requirements are rapidly expanding and that he
must devise a strategy to address this challenge, or the business will face serious growth and
compliance issues. Mohd Syafie is currently using Microsoft Excel to analyse sales data from
accounting systems and other systems that track things like social media, Internet traffic, and
many other things. He has asked you and your accounting department team to assist him in
developing a data-driven approach plan for dealing with data management and analysis of the
business.

For the initial effort, you and your accounting team department reviewed the Excel files and
reports generated by the system and discovered a lack of structure in the data model created in
Excel. You specifically advise Mohd Syafie to create effective data models because a poorly
designed data model requires hours of manual labour to maintain and refresh the reporting
mechanisms.

The data was then restructured based on what you learned about data models in your bachelor
degree programme, resulting in the Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) shown below.

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Mohd Syafie is confident that your team’s plan will help the business make better data-driven
decisions. He is eager to put these changes into action and assist the business in becoming
more proactive rather than reactive with their data.

Required:

a) Based on the ERD prepared above, design a set of relational tables to store the data.
i. Identify the tables of the entities and field/attributes in accordance with good data
model design.
ii. Identify the primary key for each table.
iii. Identify any needed foreign keys.
(10 Marks)
b) Describe the relationship between the entities in the ERD above.
(5 Marks)

c) Demonstrate the soundness of your design by entering dummy data in each table.
(at least 12 months of data)
(10 Marks)

Recently, the General Manager of the business is also requesting to implement a proper data
management and analysis to identify the business strengths and weaknesses related to the
sales and product performance, customer management and employees achievement. This is
essential to understand and detect the underlying causes of short-term changes in revenue
growth and performance of the business. Therefore, your team has been instructed again to
facilitate Mohd Syafie’s team in estimating future performance of the business, forecasting
future sales revenue, profiling customer behavior, preferences and buying habits, understanding
the sales patterns as well as performing analysis to identify the employees’ efficiency at driving
sales for the business.

This special request is needed after Mohd Syafie’s team successfully improved the data
structure, whereas you and the accounting department team has been asked to assist Mohd
Syafie to prepare a series of data analyses that highlight how the company has performed in the
past, how it is currently performing, and how it will perform in the future. In addition, the General
Manager also wants the accounting department to advice Mohd Syafie to prepare a
performance report and automate the production of these reports so that he is being provided
with up-to-date visualisations of the business at any time for future planning, coordinating and
predicting the sales performance.

Mohd Syafie knows how critical these analyses are to the success of the business performance
which can significantly improve the decision-making process. He also knows that the ways in
which the data is presented leads to decisions based on the actual data of the business. Mohd
Syafie is seeking you and department team to discuss which data should be analysed and how
the results should be presented.

You and Mohd Syafie carefully reviewed the company's data and designed a dynamic
presentation. You proposed creating a dashboard from Excel as a visual interface that provides
at-a-glance views into key measures relevant to the company's performance.

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Required:

d) Based on the data set created in requirement (c) above, perform the following analysis:
i. Sales trend analysis (RM) by month.
ii. Product trend analysis (quantity) by age group.
iii. Sales analysis by branch.
iv. Customer analysis by product.
v. Salesman analysis by product.
vi. Profit analysis by branch
vii. Other relevant analysis
(25 Marks)

e) Prepare a report based on the answers from (a) to (d) above and include the following
findings.
i. The greater detail explanation of the analysis in requirement (d) above.
ii. Describe how the current economic situation affects the performance of the
company.
iii. Explain any strategic decisions made by the company to ensure its long-term viability
in the current economic environment.
iv. Identify several key highlights for the past, current and future performance of the
business from the analysis results obtained.

(To begin the preparation of the report, you, Mohd Syafie and both department teams are
required to portray the business profile and activities (e.g.: business information, products,
employees’ details, organizational levels and chart, etc.) which are relevant to be
described)
(20 Marks)

f) Create an Interactive Excel Dashboard to visualize the above analysis.

(20 Marks)

g) Based on what you have learned about data analysis and presentation, as well as your
Internet research, justify in the report the type of visualization you chose to effectively
present the data analysis from requirement (d) above in the Dashboard.
(10 Marks)

TOTAL MARKS: 100

END OF QUESTION

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