GNVQ Advanced IT - Unit 1

Investigate industrial and commercial information technology systems

Requires students to describe and give examples of commercial and industrial systems, and to analyse and evaluate two commercial and two industrial systems..

1.  describe and give examples of commercial and industrial systems
2. analyse commercial systems
3. evaluate the selected commercial systems
4. analyse industrial systems
5. evaluate the selected industrial systems

Commercial systems: booking systems, electronic funds transfer (EFT), electronic point of sale systems (EPOS), stock control, order processing, payroll processing

Industrial system: design, process control, robotics, environmental control, traffic control.

Criteria for analysis: purpose, hardware, software, data, people, processing activities, inputs, outputs, advantages, limitations, impact on environment.

Criteria for evalution: comparison with alternative system, costs, benefits (speed, efficiency, accuracy, quality), identification of potential improvements.

A report covering all the criteria for analysis and evaluation, relating to:

• two commercial IT systems
• two industrial systems.

Information technology systems (element title): the hardware, software, information, staff and accommodation which together enable IT operations.

Commercial systems (PC1, PC2 and PC3): good examples include airlines, holiday or hotel booking systems, retail stores, mail order companies and Internet WWW trade (financial, banking, retail, information systems).

Industrial systems (PC1, PC4 and PC5): for example domestic systems such as washing machines and central heating systems, systems in public areas such as traffic lights, car speeding camera systems, telephone network, railway track control systems and photographic processing facilities, and systems used in the manufacture of electronic circuit boards, bottles, automobiles and plastic pipes.

Impact on environment (PC2 and PC4 range) for example impact on travel, pollution, radiation, better information about environmental conditions.

Selected systems (PC3 and PC5) the systems should be either selected by the tutor, or by the students and agreed with the tutor.  The systems should be large enough to enable students to consider all the items in the criteria for analysis and evaluation range.

Commercial organisations such as supemarkets which use bar code or magnetic card systems to determine customer bills and to implement stock control and reordering  activities.

The use of the Bankers Automated Clearing Services (BACS),  credit transfer, automatic teller machines (ATM) (credit, debit [Switch] and loyalty cards), types of electronic funds transfer (EFT) (transfer of funds eg. payroll, salaries directly into employees account, direct debit facilities)

Underwater cameras for investigating deep sea structures (wrecks, oil rigs, submarine telephone cables)

This unit should be integrated with Unit 2.4