Posted: November 18th, 2016

Identify and carefully describe at least three internal control strengths or weaknesses. In addition to the internal control objectives in the ERM framework in chapter 10, you can use the following objectives.

COMPANY ANALYSIS

1. Prepare Activity Models Using BPMN

After gaining an understanding of Sy’s business processes, document each current business process with a business process activity diagram using business process modeling notation.  You will likely have 4 processes:  1) purchase/pay for fish, 2) purchase/pay for miscellaneous items, 3) pay employees, 4) sell and receive payment for fish.  You don’t need to create a process for returns. Use your judgment to decide how much detail to include in your diagrams.  The start of each process usually occurs at the first interaction with the external agent and often ends with the document being mailed to Sy. If there is a customer or vendor involved and you’re sending and receiving lots of things from them, draw a separate pool for them and fill it in.  Once you have finalized the diagrams, draw them using a flowcharting tool such as LucidChart.  You can add annotations where helpful and/or where you aren’t sure how to represent something in your BPMN model.  You can also add a short written description or list of activity steps for each diagram if desired.

Deliverable:  BPMN process diagrams drawn using flowcharting software.

1. Identify control weaknesses

Identify and carefully describe at least three internal control strengths or weaknesses.  In addition to the internal control objectives in the ERM framework in chapter 10, you can use the following objectives.  These are known as management assertions regarding the transactions and events, and evaluated during a traditional audit.

1.  Occurrence—All transactions and events that have been recorded have occurred and pertain to the entity.
   2.    Completeness—All transactions and events that should have been recorded have been recorded.
   3.    Accuracy—Amounts and other data relating to recorded transactions and events have been recorded appropriately.
   4.    Cutoff—Transactions and events have been recorded in the correct accounting period.
   5.    Classification—Transactions and events have been recorded in the proper accounts.

Describe your control weaknesses using the following format.

Deliverable:  internal control table using the format shown above

1. Business process improvement

As you did in homework #7, identify one business process Sy’s fish could make to improve company performance and a metric that can be measured before and after the change to determine whether it worked.  In some cases, you might want to use a different metric before and after a change, and that is OK.  You do not need to prepare a report, you only need to describe the metric.  If this change is related to one of your custom reports though, please indicate which one.

Deliverable:  a) description of a problem faced by Sy’s Fish, b) a business process change, c) a description of expected benefits of that change, and d) a metric for assessing improvement.

1. Prepare an REA model

The events column of the REA should include the same 4 processes listed above.  Each one has two related events except payroll, which has one.  You do not need to include returns in your model or database.  You do not need to show the linking files in your REA diagram.  Many-to-many relationships are OK on the REA.  Draw your diagram with resources on the left, events in the middle, and agents on the right.  Use crow’s foot notation for your diagram as we did in class, not the UML notation used in the book.  Do your best on the minimums and don’t worry about errors in those.  Focus your attention on the maximums.  Those need to be correct for your Access database to work.  Include the primary key of each file in your diagram.  Draw your REA diagram using flowcharting software.  You may want to wait until you’ve finalized your Access database to use flowcharting software, because the diagram may change as you work.