An I.T. System for a Video Rental Store

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.        GCSE Short course I T  James. Dow

GCSE coursework

Contents

  • Choice of Problem

  • Description of Problem

  • Investigation and Analysis of Problem

  • Specification of Solution

  • Design of Solution

  • Implementation of Solution:

  • Resources Required

  • Data Collection, Capture and Input

  • Data Verification and Validation

  • Output Format

  • Testing of Solution

  • Documentation of Solution

  • Evaluation of Solution

Choice of Problem

         I live in large city called London. My Grandfather runs a video shop there under the name Video Rentals LTD. Has a large and varied amount of stock that he finds hard to keep track of. At the moment he employs a card index system but this has its limitations:

  • Cards often get misfiled meaning that extra time has to be spent refilling and amending lost data.
  • On average it takes 30 seconds to search for a record, at busy times this is too long.
  • The shop currently has about 150 customers, which means that to find a record it may take a long time, this will delay the time that it takes to sort through the records and therefore customers may not want to wait that long and may go to another shop.      

Description of Problem

        

        At my grandfathers video shop the current system involves filing all the information in a filing cabinet.  This is a manual system as all the data is hand written. I believe that because of this the video shop needs a computerised system, which will make the database better.  There will be graphical menu                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

System that will link all the forms and queries together.  My database project will allow the shopkeeper to edit, create and delete record details of members, videos and loans.

Investigation

        

        To find out more about what the database required I phoned my Grandfather. I wanted to

know:

  • The precise objectives of the new system
  • The problems or weaknesses in the current manual system
  • The information that needs to be kept on each customer
  • The required output
  • The volume of data (e.g. number of existing customers,  number of new customers each year/month)
  • Any hardware or software constraints.

My evaluation will be based firstly on whether it works properly, secondly that it is faster in finding a particular video or client than the existing manual system and thirdly that my Grandfather finds it easy to use.

 

Specification of Solution

        

Objectives of the new system

  • It should take less than thirty seconds to establish whether a customer is already on file.
  • It should be possible to go directly from the Customer Details form to the entry of a video that that customer has hired, without having to re-enter the customer’s name, etc.
  • Data entry should be as fast and as easy as possible, particularly as there are several hundred existing customers and videos to be entered when the system is first installed.
  • It be able to show who has rented what video and when.
  • There must be provision for more than one video to be hired at once by the same person.
  • The new system is required to provide the following information:
  • A list of all business customers
  • A list of all customers interested in a certain type of video such as horror, comedy etc.
  • A list of customers whose numbers of rentals exceeds a given value.
  • A list of all rentals that are overdue and need chasing.
  • It should be possible to send a standard letter to selected customers, using criteria mentioned above.
  • The user must be able to create new letters whenever needed and perform a mail merge to selected customers.
  • The main menu should be displayed automatically when the database is loaded, and the whole system should be menu driven.
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Design of Solution

A database package will be ideal for implementing the system for my Grandfather’s video rental shop. He has requested that it is done in Access 97 so this is the package that must be used. It would probably be possible to implement the system using Visual Basic or another programming language but it would take a lot longer and would involve the owners having to buy more software which is not really necessary, as Access has all the capabilities required.

I already have some experience of Access 97 and ...

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