Logistics management information system

Abstract

Korchina Logistics Holdings Limited is urging to develop a Logistics Management Information System to facilitate its daily cargo operation. After reviewing their requirements, it is a complex and comprehensive system that need to design its’ architecture carefully. The core functions of the system are to manipulate the Cargo Receipt, Cargo Release, Cargo Movement and Cargo Adjustment. It should provide an accurate stock take report finally. Besides on the core functions, it should also have security control on controlling user accessibility and user operation and auditing system is critical for monitoring user operation. Also, data consistency control is crucial for multi-user application. Since Korchina is urging to develop this new System and there are only limited resource for the development. I am looking for a technique that would give me to develop the initial stage quickly at the very beginning and it also need to give me area for expans ion for future enhancement. Therefore, flexible design and implementation tools should be used. I am going to adopt the MVC Design Pattern when designing this complex desktop application. This technique are going to cut the business objects (data layer) on one hand and separately building dialogs for the same application on the other hand. The only concerns on this design pattern lies on the integration of these screens and dialogs to produce a final consistent application. It forces one to think of the application in terms of three modules, Model, View and Controller. This Design would give the advantage on displaying different views of the data easily because the interfaces are separated from the business objects. This application architecture is very similar to a client/server model, except that all the components are bundled into one application. In the future, if there is somebody joining in developing this application together. He does not necessary to care about the business objects (database), since it is seldom change, he only focus on developing the interface is alright. It will shorten the time for expansion and division of tasks. For this project, it is using UML to illustrate the MVC Design Pattern. It is a famous tool that can help me for designing this application architecture. By using this tool, I can implement my application with the advantage of reusability and coming with a presentable documentation features. Then, I am going to use Microsoft Visual Basic as the tools for the development process. The Forms, Views and Controllers concept of Visual Basic is suitable for my development. More than that, Visual Basic is a user-friendly tool that I can easily to manipulate. Therefore, I can concentrate to design the architecture rather than consuming time on the coding of the system.