Challenge Overview
The Capital Management project will develop an application for requesting, aggregating, approving, prioritizing and tracking capital expense budgets inside a large business organization with multiple divisions and business areas.
The system will be built on .NET (4?) using the MVC4 framework with Razor syntax and C# code behind, (ASP.NET?) and Entity Framework. Front end development will use Kendo and JQuery. This project will NOT use HTML5 or CSS3. The project may not use any external, 3rd party or cloud-based solution and may not use open source software besides those identified in the previous paragraph. Project must be QA tested using IE8.
System Workflow
Expense Request:
The process of using the application begins when a user (requestor) enters information in to the system about the purchase they would like to make. The requestor enters a description of the item, cost and "Program" for which the item is being purchased. For example, the requestor may want to purchase a server for $500 for the systems upgrade program. Requests occur during a specified 1-2 month period within the Planning phase.
Approval/Prioritization:
Requests must first be approved and then prioritized at several levels within the business hierarchy. Expense approval will happen first at the business area level and finally the division level. At each level in the approval heirachy, requests are aggregated and reprioritized until they are approved to move on to the next approval/prioritization step (business area->business unit -> division). When the requests are approved at the division level, they are considered approved and budget is allocated for purchase. The final approval is a total dollar amount, which is the approved expenditure budget fot the next fiscal year, to fund a list of prioritized expense requests (who's actual costs after purchase may differ from the costs in the initial request).
Execution/Maintenance:
After plans have been approved, items in those plans may be purchased. When this happens, the items in the system will be updated periodically as the status of the purchase changes: committed->ordered->purchaseOrder->fulfilled->expensed. Only when the item's status is updated to expensed, is the money actually spent from the initial budget.
Because the plan approval is for a total budget amount and not an individual approval for each item, things can change during the execution phase of the workflow. For example, if the amount of a request changes during the purchase process, it may use more or less budget than initially expected. If the item uses more budget than was expected, then it may push a lower-priority request OUT of the approved budget of the plan. Preventing it from continuing the purchase process at the item level. Later, another item might use less budget than expected and the item in question (previously pushed out of the approved budget) can now be afforded again, so purchase may resume. The system must be designed to handle the fluidity of such changes in cost during the purchase process.
The following reports are desired:
- How much budget is left
- How much budget is spent
- How much is planned to be spent
- How does the approved plan compare to the actual costs
For a detailed description of the system and requirements, please see the attached document (Capital Management Systems Project Requirements.docx)