4 of 7    manage to respond with the information required, within the deadline and the customer then placed a further order. It was necessary to understand the sales agreements in the area, the demands of the customer and the production problems that the company faced before a realistic decision could be taken. You had to know whether the company could produce the valve, whether a sale to Arromani would threaten other commercial activities in the Middle East, and what was a realistic price for the product. Unless you had been clear about these issues a major opportunity could become a major disaster. The company might end up manufacturing the product at a loss, fail to produce it on time, or lose more business than you gain by damaging other established business in an area. Further action on the information system Following the confusion that had arisen over the Arromani order, you as the MD have decided that a common and integrated information system should be developed to prevent similar incidents occurring in the future and to enable managers at all levels to take effective decisions on the whole range of problems that they may face. You as J Franklin have succeeded in finally collecting all the currently available data in Burke Engineering. Because there was little interaction between the various departments each had their own approach to information management. The one exception was the Finance Department which prepared the monthly management reports, the main current senior management control system. You are aware that there were large areas of the company operation that were neither controlled nor effectively integrated with others, but intended to use the current situation to build up a new information system. What information is available is listed below. External contacts There was very little information provided to external contacts. The major shareholders received the monthly financial statement, and major customers received new product information via the sales force. This information was limited to single page brochures which provided little detail concerning the potential range of product application or performance. Finance Department The Finance Department was the only one that used a computer for some of its information, though much of it was still manually collected. 1. Cash flow. The Finance Department used a computer package to integrate the debtor and creditor payments to produce cash flow analyses, profit and loss statements, balance sheets, debt and creditor aging. This was used for a monthly report which was part of the management summary. 2. Accounts. The Finance Department was responsible for preparing the accounts. These were completed on an annual basis, with a manual collection of information, which meant that analyses of profitability and capital returns were only available on an annual basis. There appeared to be no information kept on how rapidly invoices were issued or when bills were paid. 3. Financial management. There was no mechanism for reviewing exchange rates;