CASE PROJECT: GREAT STATE ELECTRIC BUDGETING SYSTEM Dr. Awad Khalil

Great State Electric (Great State) is a leading Midwest utility. It supplies electricity to approximately 250,000 customers. The company has its own generating plants. The utility also has a transmission system that allows the company to move the electricity to substations where it can then be distributed to businesses and residences. As the Great State service area expands, the utility adds new facilities to serve the new customers.

The utility also spends a great deal of money upgrading its distribution system. Facilities that are old or do not have adequate capacity are upgraded. Every year in July, a construction budget must be prepared, submitted, and approved by senior management and the board of directors. The existing budgeting system is prepared using Microsoft Excel. The system is difficult to use, because projects must be copied from one spreadsheet to another. You have been hired to develop a new budgeting system using Oracle Forms Builder.

The Process The following figure is a data flow diagram for the proposed budgeting system. The following bullets describe the processes:

Construction projects are identified by the Planning (P) source. Planning is responsible for analyzing future growth and monitoring existing facilities. Identified projects will be .entered into the system by Planning personnel.

Planning sends the data represented by data flow Project Scope into the system. The data in this flow consists of PROJECT entity attributes. Two important data items in this flow are the Need Date and the Department. The Need Date identifies the date when the construction work is to be completed. The DEPARTMENT value depends on the type of work. Each project that is placed in the system is assigned to one of three engineering departments: Transmission, Substation, or Distribution. Transmission designs the transmission facilities that move the electricity from the generating plant to the substation. The Substation department designs the substation facilities. These facilities transform or reduce the voltage of the electricity, so that it can be distributed to the customer. The Distribution department designs the circuitry that moves the electricity from the substation to the customer.

Process 1.1 receives data flow Project Scope and places the data into the PROJECTS data store. When the project is created, Planning assigns it to an engineering department. The manager of the assigned department

reviews the project (Process 1.2).The manager then assigns the project to an engineer (Process 1.2).The engineer is responsible for creating a project estimate. The assignment information is then sent to the PROJECTS data store using data flow Budget Estimate Assignments.

In the next step of the process, the engineer identifies the project he is responsible for and creates an estimate. The estimating process begins with the division of the project work into work orders. Each work order covers a different part of the project and has its own bill-of-material and costs. The division (work breakdown) of the project is primarily based on the craft people involved in the work. Cement masons cannot perform electrical work. To illustrate, the construction of a substation requires work orders for the building, the equipment foundations, and the electrical equipment. Each of these work breakdowns receives its own work order. Each work order can then be further subdivided into tasks. A task represents a specific job that is to be performed. Each task is assigned to a construction department, assigned a cost account, and estimated. This work is represented by Process 1.3. The outputs of the process are sent to the WORK ORDERS data store. The data is represented by data flow labeled “Work Breakdown Structure and Costs.”

Q Process 1.4 represents the review of the work order estimates by an engineering supervisor. The flows into and out of the process are represented by data flows: Estimates, Approvals, and Rejections.

Process 1.5 represents the review of the entire project by management. The approval is then sent to the PROJECTS data store.

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Process 1.6 represents the process that creates the budget. This consists of a report sent to the Budgeting (B) source.

Great State Budgeting System data flow diagram

The Data

The following figure depicts an entity relationship diagram for the Great State Budgeting System. This diagram lists the various entities and attributes in the system.

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Great State Budgeting System entity relationship diagram

The following table depicts the project data flows and the entities that comprise the flow.

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Data flows and entities

Tables

The following figure is the data schema diagram for the budgeting database. It displays the tables, columns, column properties, and the table constraints.

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Great State Budgeting System data schema diagram

The following tables describe the system’s table columns and their characteristics.

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PROJECTS table columns and characteristics

WORK_ORDERS table columns and characteristics

DEPARTMENTS table columns and characteristics

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EMPLOYEES table columns and characteristics

WORK_ORDER_TASKS table columns and characteristics

TASK_DESCRIPTIONS table columns and characteristics

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ACCOUNTS table columns and characteristics

MONTHLY_COSTS table columns and characteristics

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