Purpose-Built Applications vs. Pre-Existing Applications

Discuss about the Taxi Booking App for Business Process Modelling.

There have been tons of debates over the years regarding the purchase and use of the right application when it comes to managing business foundations. In this case study, another of the same situation was come across. The Taxi Company stakeholders were in little dilemma over whether they should go with a pre-existing application that fulfills their scope of requirements, or should they try to build a custom made application of their own from the very scratch.

Purpose built applications are sometimes preferred more over their counterpart pre-existing applications. Purpose built apps can be made by keeping in mind all the core details and requirements of a business. However, there are a lot of cons that come with purpose built application when it comes to a small business system. Here, choosing a pre-existing application might come in handy. Even though it is possible that the chosen existing application might not have all the features as needed by the client, but they are in demand of an android application, the source code of the purchased application can always be toyed with and modified on wish. Therefore, the Premium Corporate Cabs representatives are advised to modify and use an existing application to represent their business system online.

These applications are sometimes known as off-the-shelf applications. These are generally highly robust as compared to newly built custom applications. These applications are thoroughly tested and used in the past. When a company purchases and starts using the application, it is believed that the application has already gone through many updates and bug fixes. These applications have been there for a longer period of time and have grown tremendously in terms of their usability and security features. Another one of the biggest reasons over choosing a pre-existing application is that they can be afforded at a cheaper rate compared to purpose-built applications, where tons of resources are required in the development process and also the time frame from the development is often inexplicable. These too have been built keeping in mind the business needs of many a customers and hence they come with several built-in features. 

Inspired from the recommendations from Vom et al., 2015, the business will be changed by vast margins on implementation of the new business model. The current business model is considered to be outdated in the modern tech-savvy society. The existing business model as depicted by the AS-IS model in figure 1 above, shows that there is however no use of Information technology in the whole process. The business is carried out over the use of telephonic conversations. Data is stored manually in the computers which possess tons of usability and security threats. The model is discarded in the modern society as users nowadays do not have all the time in the world to wait on a call until the business side respondent takes up his or her call and makes a booking. This also wastes a lot of financial resources of the company and also the customers that they are dealing with. As the company is growing, so is the customer base. Therefore, with the increase in customers, the responsibility of the company to upgrade to systems that can satisfy them is also increasing.

Advantages of Using Off-The-Shelf Applications

The new system that is being recommended will consist the use of information technology means to conduct the business process. The use of an android application, that is being thought about will help the company to bring down the entire business process under one roof. Customers will no longer need to call and wait for their taxis to be booked during emergency situations, neither will the company have to invest in call handling. This will allow the business to build a larger customer base. The business can also expand itself based on the applications features. The online system will also ensure that the data is maintained on a parallel scale over the business system in secured network architecture. In addition, this will give the business representatives to make tie-ups with interested Hotels. This will create awareness about the application and the business as whole and help in its growth both financially and regarding to popularity. The contact details from the logged in customers can be used in the process of ethically informing them about the offers and other promotional campaigns from the company. In addition, this will help to create a strong customer base for the company, who can be later trusted upon for reviews and improvement recommendations (Turban et al., 2018).

On using such apps, many business foundations have boomed to great heights in the recent past. Dube (2015), says the Uber Technologies Inc is one of the greatest examples. They are now globally acclaimed for cab services in almost 700 cities, worldwide. Having started off as a small cab rental service provider, they currently have over 12,000 employees all over the world and is worth 15.7 Billion.

Details about the new features of IT implementation for this application will be discussed in the next section. 

Customers will have to sign up into the application and then they can enter their pick-up and destination locations and book a taxi directly. The application will generate a message at the administrator’s end and the available taxi will be discharged for pickup. Customers will also have the freedom to check on the status of their booking, make payments and check their booking history with the company, all just a click away. The application is thought about to allow the customers to view the available hotels in or around their chosen vicinity.

The system should also allow admins to login into the system and make necessary changes to the existing data. The system should also allow the admins to update price details on a daily basis and add new taxis, hotels, routes and locations to the system. Data analytic measures shall be taken to provide an in-depth view of the business proceedings.

Opting for an Android Application

The non-functional requirements include a well-secured network that would be able to keep away malicious entries and in the same time be scalable and agile in recovering from compromised states.

Other recommendable features include a rating system and most importantly a larger database places to be offered to the customers to be able to ride. This can be made easy through the use of the Google Maps API available in android.

The company is required to rent cloud servers from third-party cloud service providers in order to store all the data that has been generated with the application all over the city. The cloud servers needs to have NoSQL database compatibility. This would allow the business to make full use of the big data technology (Hashem et al., 2015). It must be noted that the application will require both SQL and NoSQL backend to be implemented for various technical reasons, as stated below.

The SQL database would help the company to keep track of their organizational data. This will store such data in a more sequential and ordered manner. It is better to use a local server at the company premises to handle this database. Certain business generated  data can also be stored into the SQL database based on the size and frequency of their usage. SQL provides a more related and mapped stage for linking data elements. This makes it easy to be stored, modified and retrieved.

Using the NoSQL database, the company can leverage their data off to the cloud servers. This database technology will provide the business to store and handle enormous chunks of data. This certainly makes the data more integrated and scalable. Moreover, NoSQL platforms would also help the application with better scope of data analysis, which is considered as a very crucial stage of e-commerce applications (Panda et al., 2015).

Apart from the above mentioned backend requirements, the company must have a set of highly functional computers with database access software, at their office premises for their employees to operate. These employees are expected to login to the database account and carry on the backend work for the business apart from doing the lightweight administration tasks by logging into the application itself. 

            To complete any project report and to start with the implementation phase of the project it is extremely important to plan out a prophesied set of cost listing that would be required to fulfill all the functional and non-functional requirements. An abrupt costing framework of the project has been listed below:

• Purchasing the Software: From $0 to $500 (considering this as an open source software available on the GitHub)
• Make necessary software-based modifications: $1000
• Hardware for in-office: $7000 (considering $700 per computer for a minimum of 10 computers, initially) + $600 for setting up a local server
• Backend Cloud services: $100 per month from Amazon Web Services
• Promotion and Deployment: $1000
• Other additional expenses: $300

Inspired by Recommendations from Vom Et Al., 2015

Net costing prediction for the project, leaving apart Consultancy charges: $10500 (approximately).

After using and reviewing a handful number of applications available for reuse on the internet, one open-source software application was finally discovered in the GitHub, one of the largest repositories of the world. The application to be purchased, modified an used can be found in the following GitHub account: https://github.com/AndroidDev-94/MyTaxiService. The application has almost all the necessary features that the company needs to be implemented into their business. These include a dual login system for customers and admins. Customers can book taxis, view booking status and history. Furthermore, the app also allows the users to view hotels depending on the places they chose to travel. Admins are allowed to view all booking history and update price charts.

However, the android application has been designed in a static manner with no backend database as of yet. A small software team can be made to work on the application once the application has been bought. The software team will be advised to implement a back-end database pertaining to the server rules and allowances and take the application online. Another important inclusion to be made is to develop the Payment Gateway system by collaborating with some third-party gateway farm.

Lastly, it will be the work of the software design team to make necessary design based choices to change the look and feel of the application depending upon the theme of the business. 

Time frame: 6 weeks

In this phase, all the functional components are meant to be integrated as one and then connected to the backend computer and server systems. This would produce the running state of the application that is to be used by the users and the admins.

Time frame: 2 weeks

            This is probably the most important phase of the project. The application will need to be tested thoroughly before it is made to goLive to the audience. However, being a previously existing software application, it is expected that most of the features are well tested by the developer and the system is fully functional as per the requirements. Keeping all in mind, the following test plan is to be implemented to finalize the entire system:

• Unit Testing.
• Security testing.
• Black box testing.
• Alpha testing.
• Beta testing.

It is expected that the whole testing phase would take up about 4 weeks.

Finally, the project can be made ready to Go Live. Being an Android application, it is necessary for the application to be launched on the Google Playstore. This will allow the application to be reached to the fingertips of thousands all over the country.

To evaluate the product, live reviews must be analyzed with utter seriousness. The verbal feedbacks from customers should be made note of. Most importantly, the ratings and reviews made by the customers on the Google Play store must be  keenly followed and reverted back to. These are grounds on which the development team can further work upon in the future and also the company can keep a track of the acceptability of their new venture. 

References

Dube, S. C. (2015). Uber: a game-changer in passenger transport in South Africa?.

Hashem, I. A. T., Yaqoob, I., Anuar, N. B., Mokhtar, S., Gani, A., & Khan, S. U. (2015). The rise of “big data” on cloud computing: Review and open research issues. Information Systems, 47, 98-115.

Panda, R., Erb, C., LeBeane, M., Ryoo, J. H., & John, L. K. (2015, October). Performance characterization of modern databases on out-of-order cpus. In Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD), 2015 27th International Symposium on (pp. 114-121). IEEE.

Turban, E., Outland, J., King, D., Lee, J. K., Liang, T. P., & Turban, D. C. (2018). Marketing and Advertising in E-Commerce. In Electronic Commerce 2018 (pp. 361-401). Springer, Cham.

Vom Brocke, J., Schmiedel, T., Recker, J., Trkman, P., Mertens, W., & Viaene, S. (2014). Ten principles of good business process management. Business process management journal, 20(4), 530-548.