Data Table Analysis

Data Table Analysis

ACC/542

Data Table Analysis

Kudler Fine Foods is a small chain of gourmet grocery stores. It currently has three locations in California—Del Mar, La Jolla, and Encinitas. Kudler is undergoing the process of using technology to become more efficient so it can continue to grow and expand. Kudler currently uses nine data tables to organize its records related to the inventory process. In addition to the inventory-related data tables, the general ledger inventory data has been saved in Excel. This report will discuss the usefulness of the current data tables, an entity relationship diagram illustrating the Customer data table, and a pivot table that can be created to improve decision making.

Kudler’s current data tables Customer, Inventory, Item, Order, Order Line, Store, Supplier, Tax Table, and Tender are designed fairly efficiently. They provide a decent representation of Kudler’s entities—the sales and purchases; its resources—cash and inventory, and its agents—customer and supplier (Bagranoff, Simkin, & Norman, 2008). After reviewing the existing attributes of each table, it seems that a few attributes could be added to make the data tables more descriptive of the entities. For example, in the Inventory table, adding the Supplier Name attribute or even replacing Supplier ID with Supplier Name would make understanding from which supplier each inventory item is ordered. In the Item table, Labor Cost is not meaningful for most items. Only items used in the bakery will likely have labor cost associated.

A tenth data table could be added to have information about more of Kudler’s agents, its employees, and the event of hiring an employee more readily available. The table could include Employee #, Name, Address, Birth Date, Store Location, Department, Title, Hire Date, and Date of Last Performance Review.

Following the Reference section, there is an entity relationship diagram for the Customer table. It shows the...