In any application, the system development life cycle plays a crucial part as it passes through several stages such as data gathering, data design, system implementation, system testing, and system maintenance.

The initial stage of design lie in identifying the processes and the entities which represents the functionality and performed of the system. The process is established using the processes in the data flow, which can be illustrated through data flow diagrams.

The data flow diagram helps significantly in increasing the level of details with each level as the process involves sub-dividing the processes until indivisible sub-processes are reached. For the data flow to be established, certain criteria has to be met in collecting data. For Riordon Manufacturing, this includes:

• Employees - These are the individuals which accounts for the manual human resources. The varied tasks ranges from production, to management, to engineers, to designers, to administrators, and task fields implemented as needed by the company. • Clients - The clients may range in designation from investors, to customers, or to simply referring to them as clients. These are the people who invest financing and specific interest in the company's products and services, ranging from small scaled interests to large scales interests. • Manager - These people represents the head of the chain of command for the general employees, even though being employees themselves. The varied tasks lies in the day to day operations needed, analyzing sales and accounting reports as it relates to the clients and clientele, and maintain a structured flow of the operation as needed. • Visitors - These are the group of people who visit the company's website to gather information about the company and its products, but are not interested in placing the orders at that specific moment. • Production - The production module at Riordan Inc. is related directly to the Sales and the Accounting modules as sales made throughout the fiscal year is directly coordinated with the accountability and management structure. • Sales - Apart from being related to the production module, the sales module is linked with the Clients and the Managers, as client's orders for the products leads directly to sales and through the Management level, it is managed directly through the whole sales process. • Accounting - This process is directly related to the sales and the production modules as they have a direct effect on the accounting at Riordon Inc.

[pic]Diagram 1

The data flow establishes that the employee controls the production system. This involves sending the details to the necessary database as needed. The sales module makes the necessary updates from the database data to verify whether the products being ordered by the client are actually available, not available, or has any relating issues in expediting the process. From that point, the accounting process deducts the salary of the employees from the accounts of the company, while adding the earnings from the Clients and other sources which influences sales and sends it directly to the accounts database.

The data flow involves sub divided modules which are related in order of implementation directed by the flow established. These includes:

Sales Module: • Place Orders • Billing • Update Inventory • Update Software

Accounting Module: • Salary Deduction • Production deduction • Earnings • Update Software

[pic] Diagram 2

The flow chart concentrates on data design which consists of all the relationships established with all entities and their attributes. It also explains the multiplicity between various entities.

NETWORK MODEL

The networking model represents the interaction of all the hardware present in the business system. The network model at Riordan Inc. is based on a direct client design which dedicates the necessary servers for executing the application's requests from any given workstation which may support multiple users.

The network consists of ports such as Cat3 cabling, Windows 98 workstations and NT Servers, all of which facilitates established firewalls on the network. The bandwidth enables efficiency and immediate data transfer between different locations.

The networks follows a Bus and Ring topology principals with two WAN connections, each of which has a network patterned on a Ethernet backbone with an established and secured router for data transfer to and from other locations including external sources.
Each network is daisy-chained to comprise the backbone.

The following protocols are being used at Riordan Inc.

• TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol)

LAN Routing and transport protocol, which holds the entire network together.

• SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)

Network management protocol for managing the network infrastructure.

• FTP(File Transfer Protocol)

File transfer protocol for WAN/LAN wide file transfers.

• DNS (Domain Name System)

Domain naming system for network name resolution.