Visual Models for Software Requirements

Chapter 3. Business Objectives Model

A major distributor gives away nearly $300 million in credits to its customers each year. The process of calculating the credits is fully manual, performed by an offshore team. The finance team has estimated that approximately $15 million annually is erroneously paid out but was not able to pin down exactly how much. A few high-profile errors of more than $1.5 million convinced management to charter a project to reduce the errors. The errors were primarily caused by sales contracts that specified credits that allowed customers to claim multiple credits on the same purchase. These overlaps were sometimes simply mistakes in date ranges, but sometimes they were deliberate on the part of the sales teams. To rectify ...