Devise a system that would help the owner of a car dealership to organise the business.

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Candidate Name: Louise Carvey                Centre Name: Dr Challoners High School

Candidate Number: 8172                Centre Number: 52207

Task:

        Devise a system that would help the owner of a car dealership to organise the business. The aspects that the owner needs help with are:

  • A record of all stock has to be kept so that if a customer comes in and makes enquires about a specific car salesman can immediately inform them whether the dealership has such a car.
  • A record of customers has to be kept for further mailings about special offers.

Analysis:

        I am computerising a car dealerships business system. The current user is using a paper file system and the problems which they are encountering are:

  • The quantity of paper
  • Lost records
  • Retrieving records i.e. being filed wrongly by human error
  • Archiving as it is time consuming
  • Sorting records is time consuming
  • It is a fixed system to retrieve files by so no files can be received easily outside the fixed system.
  • Capacity of files / space
  • No backup / copy
  • Don’t know exactly what is in the files

The system would require some specific features such as:

  • The user would need to be able to retrieve records by multiple keys and many keys
  • The user may need to find specific customer details
  • The user may need to inter link databases
  • The user may need to mail merge information to inform customers of offers
  • The user may nee monthly reports i.e. who bought what.
  • The user may need to re-order
  • The user may need to no stock lists to see availability of items

There would be a need for the system to be able to perform searches for certain properties such as:

  • Are there any Ford cars?
  • Are there any Ford Focus Cars?
  • Are there any manual Cars?
  • Are there any diesel cars?
  • Are there any Cars under £8000?

The company currently looks for a certain make of car i.e. Ford (if all the records were filed by make) by looking at the Ford file section. This is time consuming and not very efficient.

If the company were looking for two specific requirements for a car i.e. a Ford Focus they would have to look through the Ford file section and extract all the Ford Focus records. This again is incredibly time consuming.

If the user was looking for a specific requirement that did not match the fixed filing system i.e. a diesel or automatic car or a car under a certain price when the files have been sorted by make. They would have to search all the car files and extract all the required records this would be time consuming, not instant and would not make good customer service as it would take hours to collect all of the records.

To find a certain customer i.e. John Smith the user would look through the “s” section of the customer files (sorted into alphabetical order) until they found the correct file.

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All of these methods of collection are incredibly time consuming and the customer would have to wait along time in order to find the information they were looking for. This therefore makes the paper file system inefficient.

To over come the above problems I would create a database to store all the information. I would use two separate tables one for cars and one for customers.

The car table would consist of all the cars that are owned by the company.  It would store the same specific information about each car. The table would have queries attached ...

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