Documentation of the Orman Car Rental System - Case Study Example

DOCUMENTATION OF THE ORMAN CAR RENTAL SYSTEM DESIGN, DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION Student’s Name May 2013 Orman Car Rental System This documentation includes the design, development and implementation of the Orman Car Rental System (including the associated database). The business processes of the company are highlighted and justified. The design of the system’s functionalities, which is based on the business processes, is also documented. The document also includes the system’s interface design as well as the implementation of the functionalities identified and designed. 1. Business Processes The enterprise, Orman Car Rentals, has a number of processes. Some processes can be automated but some are not possible to automate. The business processes that will form part of the Orman car rentals management application include the order processing, rental rate management, car management, customer management, and employees’ management. In order to rent a car, the customer goes to the Orman Car Rentals premises and fills a form, of which data is keyed into the computerized system. The company staffs perform various tasks, including taking care of the customers and cars doing a number of transactions, and carrying out maintenance activities. The order processing task involves the employees keying in the details filled by the customer and the computer (application) processing the information (including calculating rates and taxes, and printing receipts). The cars, customers, and employees records are added, deleted and edited as need arises. 2. Functionalities Design The business processes of Orman Car Rentals, which have been discussed above are transformed into functionalities of the company’s car rentals management application. The flow chart below gives a general overview of the system’s main functions and interactions. Figure 1 The main functionalities include processing orders, managing cars, managing rental rates, managing customers and managing staffs. In addition, the system presents screens on which users interact with the system. These functionalities can be broken down into smaller and more visible functionalities. 2.1 Processing orders The application is required to process orders of customer seeking to rent cars. To accomplish that, the application presents a screen for entry of order details and accepts and stores these details. In addition, the application performs searches in the database to ascertain that the car is available and to highlight whether the customer is eligible for the car rent. It automatically blacklists customers with a criminal record and who had a previous record of not returning rented vehicles. The application also calculates costs and displays the date the car should be returned. The system also stores the rental order; the details of the order, including date, car type and model, registration number, customer, and date of returning the car are stored into the database. 2.1.1 Data requirements The application sets a unique rental id and retrieves or accepts external inputs about date the order is processed, customer id, employee id, car id, car condition, gas tank level, initial mileage, mileage after use (borrowing), dates when the car is borrowed and return, applicable rental rate, tax rate, and order status. The application also calculates the duration that the car is borrowed, the unit costs and total order costs to customer for borrowing, and tax amount. This information is displayed to the monitor and stored in the database. 2.2 Rates, customers, employees and cars management Besides processing orders, the application (system) also manages rental rates, customers, employees, and rental cars. The application presents separate screens for input of new customers, new rental rates, new cars, and new employees and stores these new entries into the respective tables in the system’s database. The application updates customers’ details, car rental rates, employees’ details, and car details with inputs from an authorized user. It also deletes these details upon request by an authorized user: it can delete a car, customer, rate and employee in the database as well as delete all cars, customers, rates, and employees in the database at once. Performing addition, deletion and update operations requires that the user has sufficient rights to perform the operations. Data requirements To register a new customer, the application sets a unique customer id, and accepts inputs about the customer’s license number, first and last names, address, city, state, and zip code – information that it subsequently stores in the database. Employees details include unique employee id, first and last names, employee title,a nd hourly salary. Each employee is assigned a security level that allows him or her to perform specific operations with the application. Car rates data that the application manipulates includes daily rates, weekly rates, monthly rates and weekend rates, which are based on specific categories. The application needs these rates to calculate the cost for borrowing a vehicle depending the terms of borrowing. The application sets a unique rates id for every category of these rates. Data related to managing (vehicles (cars) include a unique car id that the system sets automatically, car registration number, make, model, manufacture year, car category, availability, and whether a car has a CD player installed in it. 2.3 Authentication and Authorization The application also performs authorization and authentication tasks. It presents a login screen for a user to input details, which are then compared with those stored in the database so that a user is allowed to access the system if the details match but denied access when details differ. The application also allows a user with high-level access rights to set passwords for users. A user of the system must be an employee or an official of Orman Car Rentals. On that regards, the application utilizes employee (staff) numbers a main basis for authenticating and authorizing access to the Orman Car Rentals System. The application requires a unique username and a password to authorize a user to access the system (application). 2.4 Launching application The application presents the main menu once opened from an icon or the start menu’s programs list in a Microsoft’s Windows environment. It also presents four other menu screens, which are interface for allowing users to interact with the system in order to manage cars, employees, rental rates and customers as well as perform orders processing tasks. Basically, the application presents a main screen when launched (opened) where a user selects a function among six main functions: process order, manage cars, manage rates, manage customers, and manage staff functions. Activation of any of these functions from the main menu screen opens another sub-menu screen related to the particular function. These other sub-menu screens include the manage customers interface, manage rate interface, manage employees interface, and manage cars interface. 3. Interface and Visual Basic Forms The application has six interfaces: the main menu interface that appears when the application is launched as well as the car management, rates management, customer management, and employee management interfaces. The storyboard below highlights the high-level relationships and interactions within the system’s user interface. Figure 2 On application launch, the main menu screen is opened. This interface links to the manage cars, manage rates, process orders, manage customers, and manage staffs interfaces (or menu screens). The sub-interfaces also link back to the main menu. Each of these sub-interfaces (menus) links to three other sub-interfaces: item addition, item deletion, and item update (editing) interfaces as shown in the flow chart (figure 2) above. These interfaces allows users to interact with the database and data stored in the databases. Below are the screens for the main menu interface and other submenu interfaces. The add, edit and delete interfaces are contained with the manage interface screens. a. Main menu interface Figure 3 b. Other menu interfaces The car management, rates management, customer management, and employee management interfaces will have the appearance shown below (figure 4). Figure 4 c. Prints screens i. Main menu Figure 5. Main menu The application’s main menu, the screen that appears when it is launched, appears as shown in figure 5 above. ii. Order processing interface Figure 6 iii. Car manager interface iv. Rental rate manager interface The screens, (from ii to iv) are the other interfaces of the application: order processing menu screen rates management screen, customers’ screens, cars screen, and employees’ screen. 4. Development and packaging The application was developed in Microsoft’s Visual Basic.NET. Microsoft’s Access 2007 was used as the database management system. The Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 was utilized in developing the .net application. The application is packaged together with the Visual Studio’s original development files to allow its advancement by other developers. An experienced developer can enhance the application using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and above and Visual basic .Net language. 5. Implementation 5.1 System requirements Orman Car Rental System was designed for the Microsoft Windows platform (or operating system). The application cannot work in other operating systems like Linux and UNIX, and might not operate well in Macintosh. To operate the application, it must be placed in any of the Windows operating system that supports the .Net 2.0 framework and above. The recommended Windows operating system version is Windows XP and higher. 5.1.2 Hardware requirements The following are the minimum hardware requirements for the application: Processor speed of 500 megahertz (Mhz) and above. The recommend processor speed is 1 gigahertz (Ghz). Memory (RAM) capacity of 250 megabyte (MB) and above. The recommended RAM capacity is 500MB for smooth operation. Hard disk space of 10Gigabyte or above. Besides these specifications, a standard monitor, keyboard and mouse are required to operate the application. 5.2 Database The application is dependent a Microsoft Access’s database. The database, which is named ‘OrmanCarRental.accdb’, contains four tables: Customer, Employees, Rentals, Cars and RentalRates tables. This database as well as its tables must be created before running the application. The database is created manually. For the application to work, the database and its must be named appropriately as described earlier. The database tables and fields are named as follows: Customer table: CustomerID, LicenseNumber, FirstName, LastName, Address, City, State, and ZipCode. Employees table: EmployeeID, FirstName, LastName, EmployeeTitle, HourlySalary. Rentals table: RentalID, DateProcessed, CustomerID, EmployeeID, CarID, CarCondition, GasTankLevel, MileageStart, MileageStop, RentalDateStart, RentalDateEnd, Days, RateApplied, SubTotal, TaxRate, TaxAmount, OrderTotal, and OrdeStatus. Cars table: CarsID, RegistrationNumber, Make, Model, ManufactureYear, CarCategory, CDPlayer, and CarIsAvailable. RentalRates table: RateID, RentalCategory, DailyRate, WeeklyRate, MonthlyRate and WeekendRate. 5.3 Installation The Orman Car Rental System does not require installation to operate. The executable file named ‘OrmanCarRental.exe’ and the database file named ‘ormancarrental.accdb’ are placed in a common directory (folder), perhaps a folder name OrmanCarRental. Note that the database file and the application’s file must be in the same folder. To open the application, one needs to simply double-click the executable file or right-click the executable file and select open. 6. Conclusion This document has presented the design, development and implementation processes of Orman Car Rental System. It starts with the introduction of the business processes that characterize the Orman Car Rentals’ business. These processes are translated into the main functionalities of the application (Orman Car Rental System): car management, rental rates management, staff management, customers’ management, and orders processing. These functionalities are described further by smaller tasks that the application is expected to perform. Bibliography Bronson, GJ, Rosenthal, DA 2005. Introduction to Programming Using Visual Basic .NET. Jones & Bartlett Learning, Sudbury, Massachusetts. Griffiths, I., Flanders, J., & Sells, C 2003. Mastering Visual Studio .NET. O'Reilly Media, Sebastopol, California. Groh, MR, Stockman, JC, Powell, G, Prague, CN, Irwin, MR, Reardon, J 2011.Access 2007 bible. John Wiley & Sons, New York. McMillan, M 2004. Object-Oriented Programming with Visual Basic.NET. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Roman, S 2002. Access database design & programming. O'Reilly Media, Sebastopol, California. Read More