Design and implementation of computerized warehouse management system

ABSTRACT
This research work is concise and generally summarizes the activities duly carried out in the design and implementation of computerized warehouse management system (i.e inventory control system) for Nick pharmaceutical company. The system is designed to efficiently handle the movement and
tracking of goods through the replacement of human workers by computer application software. The manual method or intervention is labour intensive, costly, and error prone and cannot ensure the inventory remains up-to-date due to oversight and internal shrinkage. With the proposed new system, inventory can be updated in real time without product movement, scanning, or human involvement. The study outlines the main concepts of the analysis and design methodology of the proposed system, compares it to the existing and goes further to explain the design and implementation of the system using Microsoft Visual studio and Microsoft MySQL for the database. The fact finding techniques employed is interview, observation, online and library research. The methodology used to achieve the development of this system is throwaway prototyping while the choice of system integration is vertical integration method.

CHAPTER FIVE

SYSTEM TESTING, INTEGRATION, AND DEPLOYMENT

5.1       TEST RESULT

The test results were gotten based on the operations and values supplied to the system. The accuracy of the program was tested with some varying data, for example using wrong password and username to login to the system. This gives the assurance that the new system will achieve its purpose and objectives.

The table below shows the Test data of the system, Expected and Actual Data.

Table 5: Expected and Actual Data Table

Test data	Expected result		Actual result
Home Page	Expected to see the main menu screen from where you can select option.		The main menu window was displayed as seen in appendix II
Admin area	Expected to see administrator login form		Administrator login form was displayed and enabled the admin to login as seen in appendix II
General manager	Expected to see the genral manager login form.		The general manger login form was displayed and enableed the general manager to login and perform his or her activities and duties as seen in appendix II
Sales manager	Expected to see the sales manager login form.		The general manger login form was displayed and enableed the sales manager to login and perform his or her activities and duties as seen in appendix II
Stock manager	Expected to see the stock manager login form.		The general manger login form was displayed and enableed the stock manager to login and perform his or her activities and duties as seen in appendix II
Accounting officer	Expected to see the accounting officer login form.	The general manger login form was displayed and enableed the accounting officer to login and perform his or her activities and duties as seen in appendix II

5.1.1 Errors encountered before integration and deployment (prototype)

During the design and coding phase of this system some errors were encountered which I later debug before proper integration and deployment, hence having an effective and working system.

The errors encountered include the following

1. Syntactic errors.
2. Inaccurate result output.
3. Improper display of pictures.
4. Unexpected result output.
5. Page linking error.
6. Database implementation error

5.2 SYSTEM INTEGRATION

System integration is defined as the process of bringing together the all the components, subsystems (modules) into one system and ensuring that the subsystems (modules) function together as one system in order to so solve the tasks besed on the requirements. It is the process of linking together different computing systems and software applications physically or functionally, to act as a coordinated whole.

5.3 METHODS OF INTEGRATION

5.3.1 Vertical Integration

 (As opposed to "horizontal") is the process of integrating subsystems according to their functionality by creating functional entities also referred to as silos. The benefit of this method is that the integration is performed quickly and involves only the necessary vendors; therefore, this method is cheaper in the short term. On the other hand, cost-of-ownership can be substantially higher than seen in other methods, since in case of new or enhanced functionality, the only possible way to implement (scale the system) would be by implementing another silo. Reusing subsystems to create functionality is not possible.

5.3.2 Star Integration

 Also known as Spaghetti Integration is a process of systems integration where each system is interconnected to each of the remaining subsystems. When observed from the perspective of the subsystem which is being integrated, the connections are reminiscent of a star, but when the overall diagram of the system is presented, the connections look like spaghetti, hence the name of this method. The cost varies because of the interfaces that subsystems are exporting. In a case where the subsystems are exporting heterogeneous or proprietary interfaces, the integration cost can substantially rise. Time and costs needed to integrate the systems increase exponentially when adding additional subsystems. From the feature perspective, this method often seems preferable, due to the extreme flexibility of the reuse of functionality.

5.3.3 Horizontal Integration or Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is an integration method in which a specialized subsystem is dedicated to communication between other subsystems. This allows cutting the number of connections (interfaces) to only one per subsystem which will connect directly to the ESB. The ESB is capable of translating the interface into another interface. This allows cutting the costs of integration and provides extreme flexibility. With systems integrated using this method, it is possible to completely replace one subsystem with another subsystem which provides similar functionality but exports different interfaces, all this completely transparent for the rest of the subsystems. The only action required is to implement the new interface between the ESB and the new subsystem.

The horizontal scheme can be misleading, however, if it is thought that the cost of intermediate data transformation or the cost of shifting responsibility over business logic can be avoided.

5.3.4 Common data format

Common data format is an integration method to avoid every adapter having to convert data to/from every other application’s formats, Enterprise application integration (EAI) systems usually stipulate an application-independent (or common) data format. The EAI system usually provides a data transformation service as well to help convert between application-specific and common formats. This is done in two steps: the adapter converts information from the application's format to the bus's common format. Then, semantic transformations are applied on this (converting zip codes to city names, splitting/merging objects from one application into objects in the other applications, and so on).

5.4 CHOICE OF INTEGRATION METHOD

The method used to integrate this system is Vertical Integration; it is the process of integrating subsystems according to their functionality by creating functional entities also referred to as silos. The benefit of this method is that the integration is performed quickly and involves only the necessary vendors; therefore, this method is cheaper in the short term. 

5.5.1 Block diagram of the subsystems integration

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