The Lack Of Information About Customer Base

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Introduction

Home Deco PVT/LTD is an Australian specialist Home Improvement company owned by Mr Varek, that specialises in the renovation or making additions to one's home. It specialises in selling Terracotta and Concrete roof titles. The services offered include roof restoration, re-roofing, and rendering. All of the staff present are professional tradesmen with vast experience in their specific trades.

Sales are increased by advertising on magazines, promotional flyers and newspaper inserts.

Realising how stressful it can be trying to find and manage different tradesmen for customer�s home restoration/improvement project, Mr Varek wants to make it easy for anybody wishing to renovate their home by having decided to invest in a comprehensive customer information system to help him keep track of his customers, see what particular needs each customer is interested with and thus boost sales by sending details of special offers, new arrivals etc.

Statement Of Problem

Home Deco PVT/LTD uses a manual information system, where all the details of the customers are written in paper format. When information about a particular customer is needed or needs to be updated,he/she needs to go through all the files and cabinets to find the intended data. This can be a tiring task. There is no proper order in the arrangement of the files and it becomes a huge mess to gather data. There is no proper duty roster and this problem mainly affects the truck drivers as they are left in confusion so sometimes miss the deliveries, which finally reduce the company income. All the data about the customers are held in hand-written documents and writing is a tiring task. The company each year spends lot of money on buying paper, stationary and filing cabinets to hold the files. This is very costly. The paper-based system is not a safe method as personal information can be referred by anybody. Taking back-up copies of important files like master file can be a hideous task as they have to hand-written.

Interview of the personnel

The current system that will be investigated is limited to the rental side. Mr Varek will be interviewed for a more in-depth understanding of the system. After that the current system will be carefully observed so that the responses from interviews can be cross referenced and checked.

Preparing for the Interview

Before carrying on with the interview, I have asked for an appointment with the owner through a letter.

October 1, 2012

Varek Turner

Home Deco PVT/LTD

C11 Generator Hall

Electric Wharf

Dear Mr Varek,

Thank you very much for being able to assist me with this project for my computing A-Level. To further the process, it would be of great assistance if I could arrange an interview with you. This interview will allow me to gain a better understanding of the current system, as well as sharing ideas for the new system. Please could you suggest a time for this interview, and contact me as soon as possible. Yours sincerely,

________________

A.Kaniah

Here the reply from the owner of the company, prior to the appointment letter that I had sent to him:-

October 3, 2012

Akshay Kaniah

931 E. Land Drive

Memphis, TN 38130

To Mr A.Kaniah,

This is to inform you that the appointment you have asked for has been granted on the 15th October at our place. Therefore you are kindly requested to come to meet me and discuss on the issues. Yours faithfully,

________________

V.Turner

Transcript

On the 4th October 2007, I interviewed Varek Turner, the manager of Home Deco. Taking place at the of?ce of the company, I questioned him concerning the proposed system. More detailed enquiries about the proposed database revealed the following facts.

1.3 Origins And Forms Of Data

Input Data

Details need to be kept on both customers and jobs.

Customer Data

The following data needs to be held for each customer:

Name

Address

Business Customer?(Y/N)

Business Name (If a business customer)

Customer Interests: Restoration/Roofing/Rendering (or any combination of these)

Job Data

As said above the current system of manually recording jobs is quite informal, and if a customer wants to have more than one good/service, for example, two job sheets may be filled in with the same job number and notes made in the �Special Instructions� field. The new computerised system should allow for more than one item per job, for example a sale and a restoration.

For each job, the following data must be stored:

� Job Number

� Job Data

� Customer Name And Address

� Type Of Item:-- Sales, Restoration or Rendering. (may be more than one different item)

� Description

� Type Of Frame (if framing item)

� Artist Name And Subject Matter (if sales)

� Job value

Output

The following reports are required:

A list of all business customers;

A list of all customers whose total jobs exceed a given value;

A list of all customers interested in, for example, a given tile, or given subject matter, or who fall into various categories such as �Rendering�,�Re- roofing�, �Sales�,�Restoration�.

The owners would also like the ability to mail letters to selected customers.

Other requirements

An inportant requirement is that any customer information can be quickly located on screen, including details of all the jobs that customer has ordered in the past. It is not intended to replace the current manual methoed of recording jobs. The jobs will still be recorded in the same way, and then entered into the database once a week. Possibly at a future date the manual system will be completely replaced, but the owners wish to proceed cautiously until they feel more confident with their PC and the Access software.

1.3 Problems with current system

I] Tracing previous orders placed by customers

Home Deco PVT/LTD uses a manual information system, where all the details of the customers are written in paper format. When information about a particular customer is needed or needs to be updated,he/she needs to go through all the files and cabinets to find the intended data. This can be a tiring task. There is no proper order in the arrangement of the files and it becomes a huge mess to gather data. All the data about the customers are held in hand-written documents and writing is a tiring task. The company each year spends lot of money on buying paper, stationary and filing cabinets to hold the files. This is very costly. The paper-based system is not a safe method as personal information can be referred by anybody. Taking back-up copies of important files like master file can be a hideous task as they have to hand-written. Paper-based system is not a long-term solution to keeping data as paper files. They are torn and damaged over time. The solution to the existing problem would be to computerise the manual records such as customer details, customer order details and part details to be kept in an efficient manner such that cost is reduced and work is done quickly.

II] Inability to send targetted mailshots

The current system does not hold any details on customers; particular interests or what past purchases they have. Currently it is not possible to send out a mailshot only to selected customers. With the number of clients increasing every year, this is impractical and expensive.

III] Lack of information about customer base

There is a general lack of information about who the most frequent customers are, who has not made any purchases for the past few years, model of tiles which has been sold most often, etc. Access to summarised information of this kind could be useful for planning future stock purchases, marketing campaigns and so on.

Objectives

2.1 Objectives related to the company

1. Having an efficient system where less physical space is needed.

2. To store personal information about the workers safely, so that only certain peoplecan refer them.

3. To arrange data in an order so that searching for a file is easy.

4. To have back-up copies of important files so that they can be used to recover lost data.

5. To calculate final order cost efficiently and accurately for customers.

6.To reduce workload of the staff.

7.To have well organized filing system which data can be accessed quickly and accurately

2.2 Objectives related to the computer

1. To create an organized database.

2. To perform accurate calculations on order cost, transactions made etc. as computers are very accurate in calculations.

3. To use a large database to store data in an effective manner:

i) To create tables, queries, forms and reports to present data in a successfulstyle.

ii) To make changes to data in the database such as inserting, deleting,amending and sorting.

To store personal information safely with the use of passwords then unauthorized staff member will not be able to access data.

5. To check what each customer has ordered and number of orders made.

6. To create backup copies so that lost data can be recovered. Eg: Master files.

7.To enable fast and convenient data entry and data should be validated before processing them.