Yachts Australia is a small size company owned and operated by a family, and offering charter yacht services in the heart of the Great Barrier Reef; this is an easily navigable area, implying a reduced need for specialized skills. Yachts Australia is currently being run by Alice and Paul, and it has been passed on by Paul's parents, who retired. After taking over the business, the young couple expanded its operations to complete more trips, to deliver more services -- such as catering while on the boat trip -- and they also increased the size of the YA fleet. Today, this is formed from 6 sailing yachts, 4 catamarans and 6 skippered touring boats.

In order to capitalize on the success the company was registering, Alice and Paul engaged in franchise operations, through which similar products are offered by partners along the coast. While the business model implemented generates positive results, several challenges remain for Yachts Australia. These would be addressed throughout the following section.

3.1. Current problems

Some of the more notable problems currently encountered by Paul and Alice include the following:

Increased operational complexity

Insufficiency of the record keeping system

Double bookings and other mistakes generate customer dissatisfactions

Increasing competition within the industry.

3.2. Minimum system requirements

The complexity of the problems encountered at Yachts Australia generates the need for a new system to be created and implemented. This new system would have multipurpose usages and its main feature would be that of centralizing information about the company and the industry, and as such, supporting the decision making process at the organization (Murphy and Willmott, 2010).

The new system would be constructed in a manner to serve four distinctive features, namely booking, information storing, security issues and industry benchmarking. The lines below explain these...

The new system would have to provide a computerized and integrated manner to completing these operations; it would have to check the correctness of the booking and booking related information, and it would be expected to ease and increase the efficiency of the overall process.
Within the current context, Alice is the one possessing most of the information, and the employees' access to the data is rather restricted. The new system would store all information and would make it easily accessible to the staffs.

Security issues are raised especially in relationship to the temporary staffs hired to help out in the peak seasons. The new system would as such ensure higher degrees of information safety and security.

Last, the new system would allow the company to compare itself with the industry by revealing the industry growth rates and the company growth rates, as well as the opportunities in the industry; furthermore, this feature of the system would allow the company to conduct analyses based on several potential scenarios.

4. Feasibility analysis

4.1. Technical feasibility

The current system is technically unfeasible. It relies extensively on the human brain, with its sparks, but also its limitations. The information is mostly possessed by Alice and it is not easily accessible to the YA employees. Calculations and bookings are made on paper, which might easily be lost. The result of this technical unfeasibility is the high number of double booking, as well as other mistakes, which generate customer dissatisfactions.

4.2. Economic feasibility

The current system is economically feasible for Yachts Australia since it is easy to support. In other words, it does not require large investments to be operated, but it virtually runs on minimum investments.…