The automatic product management system (APMS): Integrated business process management for a small business application

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the business management process for small to medium size enterprises (SMEs) and to develop an automated product management system for integrated business processing. Due to the relatively small scale of operation of these companies, they experience difficulties in applying readily available tools in the area of product management. The target of the analysis is to develop a prototype software system for automatic product management. Moreover, this software developed for this thesis is applied to a real business case—that of Inshore Fisheries, a small scale integrated fishing operation in Atlantic Canada. The system consists of six components that are grouped into two categories of input and output analysis. The Input category includes production operations and customer ordering. The Output category includes four performance reports: (1) order invoices, (2) production worksheets, (3) inventory tracking, and (4) periodic income statements. The entire system is implemented using Visual Basic 6.0. The database is designed using Microsoft Access. The four performance reports in the output are designed using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Furthermore, a GUI integrates all components together to form a complete business processing system.; Based on the results of the application of this system to Inshore Fisheries, this software solution can be applied to other SMEs by making specific modifications but without revising the basic principle and system design of the software system. This system possesses a great amount of flexibility and extendibility for practical business process decision-making.