MANAGEMENT

INFORMATION SYSTEMS
IT 3001

3rd Year Group Assignment

Stephens Apparel Manufacturers

Bio Group 2
3rd Year
Faculty of Science
University of Colombo
 Group Members

• E.K.C.Pradeep (8178)

• U.D.P. Perera (8101)

• K.S.C. Kumarasiri (8084)

• G.G.T.Y. Gunathilake (8064)

• D.R. Kosgallana (8132)

• T.A.N. Siriwardena (8148)

• U.D.W.C. Abeyrathne (8041)

• N. Amarakoon (8044)

• H.R.C. Kumara (8034)

• M.L.R. Karunarathne (7663)

• C. Priyantha (7776)
 Stephens Apparel Manufacturers

Stephens is a leading apparel manufacturer whose head office is located in Kalutara and also
Its main factory is located in Kalutara while it has two other factories located Panadura and
Biyagama.

It was established in early 1990s as family business in Kalutara area.

Stephens provides garments to ladies, gents & children. It does both retail sales and
wholesales.

Stephens currently has a human resource about 550, out of which majority represent the
production flow employees who are responsible for sewing garments.

Within its organization Stephens has four departments namely Production dept, Sales &
Marketing dept, Accounting dept & HR dept.

In Stephens some non-core activities such as security. cleaning, and canteen facilities have
been out sourced to some external parties.
Production Department

Customer place order either directly by coming into organization or by making a call. Order processing department, which is responsible for
handling these orders will take the order and inform the customer about the order status.

Order processing department checks the finished product availability from inventory department, where inventory department checks stock
levels and inform the finished product availability back to the order-processing department.

If inventory does have sufficient amount of stock it will send the required amount of goods to dispatch department where dispatch department
will dispatch the required amount of goods to customers upon the return of payment receipt for cash sales or credit note if it is credit sales.

If inventory doesn’t have sufficient amount of stock, order processing department send a production specification and a production request to
production department.

Production department checks the availability of raw materials from inventory department and inventory department will inform the raw
material availability back to production department. If inventory has necessary raw materials it will start production. After that production
department will inform to order processing department about the production status.

If inventory does not have sufficient amount of raw materials inventory department will send a purchasing request to purchasing department.
Then purchasing department will place a purchasing order with the registered suppliers, and inform inventory about the purchase request.

Then supplier will send a purchase invoice to purchasing department and send the goods to the inventory.
 Accounts Department

Customer
Inventory
Good
Dept.
received
Make note
Sales payment
invoice/
Receipt

Order Check customer creditworthiness

Purchase invoice
Processing Accounts
Supplier
Dept. Dept.
Inform customer creditworthiness

Send salaries & wages information

Send Sales & Marketing
expenses information
Salaries & wages payment Sales & Marketing
expenses payment
Human
Recourse
Dept. Sales & Marketing
Dept.
 Production Department
Dispatch goods
Customer Dispatch
Dept.
Provide receipt / Credit note
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Purchasing
Order Processing Inventory Dept. Dept.
Dept.
Inform about purchase order
Inform finished product availability
Send goods
Check raw material availability

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Inform raw material availability

Supplier
Production dept
 Accounts Department

When a customer places an order with the order-processing department it

will inform the Accounts Department about the order.

If it is for credit sales Accounts Department will check the

creditworthiness of the customer based on previous records of customers
and inform the order-processing department about customer’s
creditworthiness. Further decisions to carry out transaction are based on
this creditworthiness report.

If Accounts department approves credit it will send a sales invoice to the

customer. Customer will make the payment to Accounts department at a
later day based on this credit note.

Upon payment received Accounts department will issue a receipt to its

customers.

When organization places an order with its suppliers, suppliers will send
purchase invoice to the organization.

When inventory department receives the goods from suppliers it will send
a goods received notes to Accounts department.

Accounts department will make the payment to suppliers based on

purchase invoice and good received notice.

Accounts department will receive salaries and wages information from

Human Resource Department. Then it will evaluate these expenses and
make the payment to
Human Resource Department.

Sales and Marketing department will send their expenses to Accounts

department. Accounts department will evaluate these expenses and make
necessary payments to Sales and Marketing Department.

Accounts department is responsible for preparing the overall budget of

the organization. At the end of the year they will compare the budget with
actual figures and analyze any variance present and take necessary action.
 HR Department
HR department and its functionality

In any organization HR plays basically three primary roles namely:

• Aligning HR strategies to organization’s corporate objectives

• Securing workforce commitment through building a strong
culture
• Achieve flexibility and adaptability to change and innovate in
accordance with external and internal forces.

At Stephens Apparel Manufactures is recognized as the most important

of all and their driving force further they strongly believe in caring for
their employees and developing them.

In Stephens Apparel Manufactures HR is not just a supporting function

but act more responsible role as a strategic partner in strategy and policy
formulations. HR department operates on its HR strategy derived from
the corporate strategy and always adheres to its policies and company
values.

HR works in order to reach Stephens Apparel Manufactures’ HR vision.

Following are the main functions performs by HR department of
Stephens Apparel Manufactures Private Ltd

• Take part in strategy formulation in corporate level (Head of HR

and top managers) and its own HR strategy.

• Recruitment and selection of best people to all vacancies through:

 External Recruitment

o Advertising in newspapers
o Dealing with recruitment agencies
o Executive search
o Conducting campus recruitment

 Internal Recruitment
 o Promotions
o Transfers
o
Selection – Interviews, psychometric tests & assessment centers
(Managers/ Executives)

Designing, coordinating and conducting orientation/ familiarization/

induction programs at the entrance of new employees (welcoming and
integrating them into the organization)

HR Planning
Assess required Human Resources in right number and quality (skills,
talents, knowledge) and explore other options such as promotions,
transfer, making employees multi-skilling through training and
development.

Human Resource Development (Training & Development)

o On-the-job training
o Out-bound training

For all levels even for sewing girls, clerical staff

o Succession planning, career planning for all employees

o Sponsorships, financial assistance for employee education
o Career development, personality development programs
o Special awareness campaigns, training on other aspects like family
planning, household income management, and women
empowerment.

Performance management

Tracking employee performance levels, identifying training needs, inputs

for succession planning and salary decisions, documentation of all
employees’ performance, identifying employee individual needs, their
special talents, potential strengths, areas of improvement (weakness).
Under this HR work in collaboratively with other functional heads and
supervisors and basically do advisory and coordinators role as well.

Compensation management

Job analysis, job evaluation, salary administration, bonus, incentive

schemes, salary increments and all related activities. Both financial and
particularly non-financial rewards are considered. Maintain performance-
base pay system and group incentives especially for sewing girls,
machine operators.

Maintain cordial Employee relations

Maintain open-door policy, participative management style, and

transparency in decision-making throughout the Stephens Apparel
Manufactures . This is achieving through maintaining good dialogue
between management and employees by sound communication system
conduct proper negotiations and sound grievance handling procedure.

Compliance

Basically ensure compliance with labour laws, health and safety, working
conditions. Stephens Apparel Manufactures extremely interested in
providing healthy and pleasant work setting for their employees.
Employee welfare and services

Insurance scheme for executives, annual eye camp, free health care
facilities for all employees during work, free meals for all employees,
subsidiary retailed outlet for Grade-1&2 level employees (sewing girls,
supervisors), annual sports day, parties, avurudu festival day, annual
poson dansala, company annual trip (above executive level) & Employee
assistance program (counseling for all employees)

HRIS(Human Resource Information System)

Automated all HR documentation, performance management, salary

systems, and employee information. HR department conduct climate
surveys, attitude surveys, receive employee suggestions and further
processed through HRIS. Its works with IT department.

Ensuring healthy industrial relations

This entails ensuring discipline of the work force.

• Upon any disciplinary misconduct, inconsistence with company
rules, regulations.
• HR department work with legal advisors, government agencies
(labour department) and deals with legal cases regarding employee
matters
• Termination of employees
• Dealing with Trade unions
• Directly and actively involve in resolving industrial disputes
(strikes, lockouts….)
 Sales & Marketing Department

Sales & Marketing Department is responsible to carry out all sales and
marketing related activities within Stephens.

Sales & Marketing Department identifies the customer’s requirements by

carrying out various marketing research activities. These marketing
surveys are based on primary data sources survey researches and
secondary data sources such as accounting records, sales force reports
and reports generated by other apparel manufacturer’s and industry
related agencies.

Also Sales & Marketing Department identifies the environmental &

geographical trends that Stephens has to deal with when carrying out
operations.

Stephens’s Sales & Marketing Department is responsible for setting up

prices for the garments that Stephens manufactures. In order to carry out
this activity Sales & Marketing Department has to use information
generated by Accounting Department such as total cost of production and
budgets.

Also they are responsible for analyzing cost & profit margins for each
garment item that Stephens manufactures. Discounts and commission that
should be given customers and Stephens’s wholesale and retail sellers are
decided by Sales & Marketing Department.

Sales & Marketing Department of Stephens is carrying out promotional

activities such as advertising, sales promotions. Also they are responsible
for prepare promotional budgets.

Sales & Marketing and Department decide distribution channels that

Stephens should use. Market coverage details, warehousing information
and transportation details are also handled by Sales & Marketing
Department.

Customer information is primarily handled by Sales & Marketing

Department. They keep track record about each customer and each
customer order. When other departments such as Accounting Department
require this information to assess credit worthiness Sales & Marketing
and Department will provide required information.
Also they are responsible for handling customer complaints relating to
the sales that Stephens has carried out. If there is any fault in a garment
that they have sold, if possible they will change the garment with
another.

IT Infrastructure
Stephens Apparel Manufactures is one of a rapidly developing trading
company. The main obstacle they encountered is agency cost that they
have to pay as the continual growth of the company. The main key thing
missing in their current business processing system is that they lack well
structured formal information system even they were already
implementing a information system. Current information system of the
system is limited to exchanging emails, sending reports between
departments manually, no direct networking between departments, lack of
strong interconnecting between branches.

The main weakness in their current IT infrastructure is their networking

structure is not suitable for their country wide branches. In order to
bypass that weakness we suggested virtual private network. With the
VPN they could easily interconnect with each branches and share
expertise in one branch with another branch, online access to each branch
resources etc.

In each branch they haven’t got a central file server of company resources
files. We implemented a file server to overcome that. We installed
windows server in powerful computer with over 1 TB hard drive to store
the company data. Another backup hard drive was also introduced in
order to recover files in case of disk failure. In each department there are
also file servers and print servers to increase department performance. As
Network operating system we Installed Windows Server 2008 to the file
server and print server (same machine).
For the VPN we installed VPN server to authenticate VPN usernames and
passwords.VPN was implemented via fast broadband connection.
For the database we installed SQL server 2005 enterprise edition.
Database structure we introduced was well compliant with normalization
techniques, referential integrity rules. Security concerns were well
organized in order to minimize possible data hacking.

Table Structures
Purchase Orders table (OrderID, SupplierID, OrderDate,
CustomerID, Amount)

Supplier Table (SupplierID, SupplierName, Address, ContactNo)

Customers Info table (CusomerID, CustomerName, ContactNo,

Address)

SalesOrders (OrderID, CustomerID, Date, Amount)

In order to increase their sales we introduced online customer order

processing system and online delivery system. But due to practical
reasons Stephens Garments couldn’t practically invest large amount of
capital cost and resources that will be needed to achieve such a task.