Business Case

Business Case for Online Bookshop Website

Date: 06/01/2012

Prepared by: Le Manh Tuong

1.0  Introduction/ Background Tien Phong Companry’s core business goal is to provide a clean and highly-interact online bookshop service to consumers throughout the country and all over the world in the future. The CEO, Pham Gia Bao, believes that they can gain much more profits from this online service, beside the normal offline transaction at their branch book shops.

2.0 Business Objective To grow the business and achieve sales of $2000 in the market in 2012.

3.0 Current Situation and Problem/Opportunity Statement       Tien Phong Book Company has witnessed the problem of decreasing demands from customers visiting the shop. This might somehow be the consequence of ineffective-marketing.       From the foundation day till now, Tien Phong Book has not develop any website to support marketing the service and publicize book list for online user to order online. Book-lovers now tends to surf the web for price before make any decision where to buy books.       Along with the growth of technology and globalization as well as e-commerce, many corporations have found their ways in making use of the Internet to gain profit for them. The approach of using website to show goods and review online, for customer to purchase goods online is now becoming more and more popular in the society.

4.0 Critical Assumption and Constraints The proposed new website must address all the current problems the company are facing to. Current director of Tien Phong Company must actively support the project. The new system must purchase the required software and hardware, and must run on those. Moreover, it should require minimal technical support. Its frontend must be easily accessible by all customers, and its backend must be secure from unauthorized user. .

5.0 Analysis of Option and Recommendation There are two options for addressing this opportunity: 1)      Purchase an inherent website available in the Internet to meet the demand and attach to it with some self-reconfiguration. 2)      Design and implement the brand new website using the totally new software and hardware. Based on discussions with stakeholders, we believe that option 2 is the best option.

6.0 Preliminary Project Requirements The main features of the Online Bookshop include the following: 1)      Administrator role is able to manage (add/view/update/delete) category, book, user, order, shopping cart list 2)      Frontend unregister users are able to browse category, browse all books, browse books by category, manage their shopping carts (add/delete items, update quantity, remove items, clear cart), and do check out to fill related information for an shipping order. 3)      Frontend registered users are able to give comments on books and change user profile

7.0 Budget Estimate and Financial Analysis A preliminary estimate of costs for the entire project is $1000. The estimate is based on the project manager working about 25 hours per week for 4 months and other internal staff working a total of about 40 hours per week for 4 months. The customer representatives would not be paid for their assistance. A staff project manager would earn $3 per hour. The hourly rate for the other project team members would be $3.5 per hour, since some hours normally billed to clients may be needed for this project. The initial cost estimate also includes $1000 for purchasing software and services from suppliers.  After the project is completed, maintenance costs of $200 are included for each year, primarily to update the server and software. Projected benefits are based on a great amount of orders received. Projected benefits are also based on a huge increase in profits due to new business generated by this project as well as advertisement. Total benefits, therefore, are about $2000 per year. Exhibit A summarizes the projected costs and benefits and shows the estimated net present value (NPV), return on investment (ROI), and year in which payback occurs. It also lists assumptions made in performing this preliminary financial analysis. All of the financial estimates are very encouraging. The estimated payback is before one year, as requested by the client. The NPV is $3712, and the discounted ROI based on a three-year system life is excellent at 253%.

8.0 Schedule Estimate The sponsor would like to see the project completed within 4 months, but there is some flexibility in the schedule. We also assume that the new system will have a useful life of at least 5 years.

9.0 Potential Risks There are several risks involved with this project. The foremost risk is a lack of  interest in the new website by the client’s customers. Also, user input are crucial for populating information into the website and realizing the potential benefits from using the system. Moreover, as for technical risks, it is determining among the inherent frameworks or inherent content management system (CMS) which is the most suitable for this project.

10.0 Exhibits Exhibit A: Financial Analysis for Online Bookshop Website Project