Benefits of using a decision support system in a cleaning company

This is a paper that is focusing on the benefits of using a decision support system in a cleaning company. The paper also provides a brief description of the cleaning company to use in the assignment.

Benefits of using a decision support system in a cleaning company

Question 1. A director of a cleaning company is responsible for scheduling of cleaning services of a chain of fifty supermarkets in a city in Australia. Each supermarket is cleaned every two days by cleaners of this cleaning company. Currently there are several complaints about the cleaning services provided to supermarkets by this cleaning company. The complaints are in regard to irregular cleaning dates and insufficient number of cleaners scheduled for cleaning of supermarkets.

The director of the cleaning company does not expect any increase in the number of cleaning staff for the next three years. The director’s major role is to schedule cleaners for cleaning supermarkets as well as making sure that each cleaner takes his/her entitled four weeks of holidays each year. Each annual leave form is then submit to the director for manual entry of these annual leave data to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

The director of the cleaning company is considering the possibility of purchasing and using a decision support system for scheduling of cleaners and monitoring of annual leave requests of the cleaners. The director has a top-end PC. Also, the newest version of Microsoft Office which is in use by the director for word processing. Based on the scenario above answer the following questions:

Benefits of using a decision support system in a cleaning company

1.1 Firstly, this cleaning company intends to purchase a decision support system to assist its director in scheduling of cleaners to supermarkets. Describe three benefits of using a decision support system by the director of this cleaning company. What features should this decision support system have to assist the director in scheduling of cleaners to supermarkets? Also, how can this decision support system assist in managing the leave bookings of cleaners? Explain your answer.
(5 marks)

1.2 Secondly, the director of this cleaning company has asked you to investigate the use of data visualization provided by decision support systems. This is for assisting in visualization of cleaning schedule of supermarkets. Explain how data visualization of decision support systems can assist the director in this matter.
(5 marks)

1.3 Thirdly, describe briefly how a data warehouse can be with a decision support system for this cleaning company. To enhance business tasks such as customer satisfaction and complaint handling to reduce complains about the cleaning of supermarkets. Describe the importance of data quality for the data to be in the data warehouse of this cleaning company. What kind of data needs to be stored in this data warehouse?
(5 marks)