Food-Service-Manual-for-Health-Care-Institutions

Elements of an MIS
In addition to the characteristics enumerated above, an effective MIS design meets the specific
needs of an individual food service operation. Although this tailoring requires a variety of
approaches and designs, all effective systems typically evolve from the four interrelated elements
or components mentioned earlier: input, processing, output, and feedback. These components
are illustrated in Figure 10.1 and detailed in the following sections.
Input
Input involves the capturing and gathering of raw data for each business transaction. In producing
monthly checks for a cafeteria’s vendors, for example, the dollar value of each delivery
by each vendor during the month must be arrived at before checks can be calculated by the
accounts payable office or printed. Input can take many forms but is usually supported in writing
by a source document. Input errors may occur while the data are being entered into a system,
which often accounts for the failure of information systems to produce desired results. A
source document provides a permanent record of an individual transaction. In an MIS designed
to produce vendor checks, then, an invoice provided by the vendor at the point of delivery
would serve as the source document. Source documents for the operation’s marketing unit
could include cafeteria customer surveys or records of patient interviews.
The typical health care food service operation collects volumes of source documents during
the course of business. This creates numerous problems for handling, storing, and retrieving
original source documents. Due to advances in MIS technology, certain aspects of the MIS
are available in a paperless, electronic format. But before this format can be implemented successfully,
the accuracy and security of data must be assessed, which occurs in data processing.
Figure 10.1. Four Elements of an MIS
Input
Data
Source documents
Processing
Treatments
Sorting
Classifying
Calculating
Summarizing
Storing
Feedback
Treatments
Comparing
Evaluating
Ouput
Information
Documents
Reports
Management Information Systems
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