A Database Design Case

M/S Northern Corporation involved in a marketing business, sales a range of products from
household to office equipments through out the continent. The company does not have any
retail sales counter. The salesmen, who work on commission basis, takes order from
customers and the order is shipped through a shipping company.
With the advent of computer system, company felt that a database be designed to store sales
information, the customer and products of the company and what products each customer has
ordered, along with their prices, discount, shipping information and so on. A first attempt to
record all of this information might be to enter long line with every bit of information about
each item ordered (and purchased), its price, the quantity ordered, the customer who place the
order, the employee who made this sale, where the item was shipped and so on. Storing all
the information as a single string was very easy but it would not probably be easy to recall all
kind of information for the sales analysis purpose.
A system analyst studied the existing system of the company. He analyzed the working of the
manual processes up to the minute detail and collected the information through the following
two means:
1. Interviewing of companys staff from top managerial level to down in the hierarchy.
2. Collecting various formats viz bill form, order form, shipment challan and other
output reports etc
.
During the study the system analyst observed the following:
1. Whole business of the company revolves around six major entities- the products, the
supplier, the customers, the orders, the salesman and the shippers.
2. Company maintains the inventory record of each product. When the stock falls below
a certain level of stock, it places a purchase order of the product on to the supplier.
The supplier delivers the product through a shipper.
3. Information about the products sold by the company includes Product name,
Packaging information, price, current stock and the relevant things. A product may
come from two suppliers. Likewise a supplier may supply two or more products.
4. A customer places the order for one or more product through a salesman. The
company dispatches the ordered product to the customer along with the invoice
through a shipper. It has been noted that the shipment address, where the items are to
be delivered, may be different from that of customer address.
5. Each order is made up of one or more items, and each item has a price, a quantity and
a discount. Total cost of the order is calculated on quantity, prices discount and freight
charges. In other words details of all invoices are organized according to the order to
which they belong.
6. Employees of the company work on the commission basis and the commission bill of
the employee is calculated on net order cost after the payment is realized from the
customers. Salesman commission on the product varies from item to item.
7. The most common queries on the database include:
(i)
List of customers, suppliers, products and employees.
(ii)
Retrieving a customer order.

(iii)
(iv)
(v)
(vi)
(vii)
(viii)

Calculating total for each order.

Calculating total for each customer.
Calculating total for each employee.
Locating the state in which a particular product is very popular.
Best selling product of each month.
But selling employee.

Data Keys :
Keeping in view the operation of the company as discussed above and on careful analysis of
the data flow diagram, the System Analyst prepares the following data keys :
Order No.
Order Date
Required Date
Shipped Date
Shipping Company Name and Phone
Freight charged
Shipto Name and Address*
Product Name and Product Details**
Unit Price
Ordered Quantity
Discount
Employee Name and Employee Details***
Customer Name and Customer Address*
Payment Received
Commission Paid
*The Address of each entity stores the following information.
Address1, Address2, City, Region, State, Pin code, Country, Phone, Fax
**The Product detail includes the following information.
Product Model, Supplier Name, Supplier Address*, Supplier Home Page, Unit Price,
Units in Stock, Unit on Order, Reorder Level, Discontinued, Rate of Commission.
***Employee Details includes
Birth Date, Hire Date, Photo, Notes, Report To
As database designer your task is very important. This will be base for the over all
performance of the company. Your task is two fold.
Verify and authenticate the data keys generated by the system analyst to that of
companys operation.
Make the structure of table(s) confirming to the third normal form of database
normalizing rules. Also define the relationship between the tables mentioning the
primary key and foreign keys of each table.

Problem To Ponder :
As far as the operation of this application is concerned, customer and supplier are treated as
two separate entities and there is no overlap between the two.
But to me, customer and suppliers are same entities with different functions. Keeping in mind
the real world situation, the two entities may not be totally isolated, as the same company
may act both as a supplier and as a customer. In other words, It may not only sale to your

company but buy from it as well. In this situation what will you do? What complication may
occur in this approach?