Development And Implementation Of An Online Booking System For FastDrivers

You are required to design a system that can perform the above activities and maintain a database containing data relevant to those activities. Carry out “process modelling” and “data modelling” to achieve this purpose.  
Your tasks in this project include: -  
•Provide a justification of why this system needs to be developed and ensure that you are professionally convincing to senior management.  
Provide a description of the business case and justification about the business benefits from implementing this system.

•Describe the project scope and provide a brief cost and schedule analysis.  
•Identify the major functions in the system that will be required in order to meet the business needs.  
•Conduct the TCO of this system in Excel; add your full name and student ID in Excel in row 1. Embed the TCO part from Excel into the Word document, which is your assignment file. Ask the teacher to show you how to embed this if you are not sure.  
•Develop data flow diagram (DFD level 0 and Context Diagram with at least 2 different processes).  
•Prepare entity relationship diagram, to model the data requirement relevant to this system.
•Create 3 screen interfaces a (main menu, an input screen and the monthly sales report) that will be used in the system designed by your group.

Justifications for the System

FastDrivers is a company that offers driving lessons to its customers in the state of NSW. It has undertaken a project to develop and implement an online booking website for its customers. The website must enable the customers to book driving lessons schedule from web and from mobile devices.

The system must provide user friendly interfaces to the customers and must be able to collect details from the customers, help them to book a convenient driving lesson schedule, finding instructor for the scheduled lessons, tracking payments etc.

The aim of the report is to provide information about the design of the system, cost and schedule analysis of the project, and other relevant information to the management of the FastDrivers so that they can take final decision about the proposed information system and the project. In the following sections of the report, there are discussions on the justification of the system, business case, the benefits of the proposed system, project scope, cost and schedule analysis, functions of the proposed system, TCO, and various architectural and behavioral system designs including context diagram, level 0 data flow diagram, entity relationship diagram, and wireframes of three screen interfaces.

Information systems have become a necessity for modern businesses. To leverage the benefits of e-businesses, online platforms, and mobile commerce, FastDrivers must implement the proposed information system. The justifications to undertake the project on developing and implementing the proposed information system are,

• It will help the business to align the business process with information technology. The centralized data collection and business management process will help to integrate all sub processes of the business and all business activities. That will increase the visibility of the business records, accuracy of the records and will accelerate the business processes.
• The business operated in NSW. The online platform will help them to reach to their targeted customers faster. There are various online channels for marketing and business promotions. For examples, social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. will help them to reach to their customers’ faster, conversion of a visitor into a customer faster, and to promote the business using various promotions, advertisements etc.
• The online platform will help them to offer better support for the customers. They can implement a dedicated module to help customers in assisting the registration process, payment, general queries and questions.
• Even though the initial investment in the information system development project is high, but considering the monetary equivalent of the tangible and intangible benefits from the project in long term will help the business to make more profit.
• The system will help them to reduce their operational cost by automating various business process. At the same time it will help to reduce the manpower required to run the business and many other related operational cost.
• It will help to improve the business process by reducing the human errors for data entry, data duplication, data inconsistency and so on. It will save time and improve the overall productivity.
• The information system will help to improve the communication with the customers, the instructors and the management.
• The system will be scalable and as the business grows with time, the system can be extended to support the changes in the business processes due to the business growth.
• It will help in better decision making based on data processed by the system. Well-informed decision making will help to stay ahead of the competitors in the market and to grow the business faster (Dennis, et al., 2014).
• All business data will be organized, stored, and processed in a centralized information system. That will help to generate various reports to understand the profitability of the business at any point of time.

The business case have been presented in the following table.

The scope of the project is limited to the design, development, and implementation of the proposed online booking system for the FastDrivers. Working on any other business process like marketing, accounting, HR, instructor management and acquisition etc. are out of the scope of the project.

The WBS or work breakdown structure for the project is given below. Based on the WBS, the detailed project schedule has been created.

And the detailed project schedule with cost and resources is,

The major functions of the proposed information system are listed below (Bocij, et al., 2015).

• A customer must be able to register himself/herself by providing personal details and payment information like credit card details etc.
• A customer must search from the available driving lesson slots for booking, it must include details of the instructors assigned for each slot.
• A customer must be able to give his/her own preferences for the timing and place for a driving lesson. In that case the system must be able to find an instructor to match with the requirements of the customer.
• A customer must be able to make online payment using credit cards.
• A customer must be able to access his/her account with FastDrivers.
• A customer must be able to check past booking history, scheduled bookings etc. on his/her user account.
• A customer must be able to communicate with an instructor assigned to one of his/her scheduled booking via the proposed system.
• The system must be able to generate receipt of payments, confirmation of booking etc.
• The management must be able to generate various reports on the business transactions, customers, bookings etc.
• Instructors must be able to check their scheduled bookings and reply to customers.
• Instructors must be able to take customized booking made by the customers.
• A customer must be able to provide feedback on a lesson when it is completed.
• An instructor must be able to provide a feedback on a lesson when it is completed.
• The system must keep a record of the instructors’ profiles.
• An instructor must be able to access his/her profile.

For an information system, the TCO or Total Cost of Ownership includes the cost to purchase or develop the information system, cost to acquire required licenses, maintenance cost, and other ongoing costs like networking, salaries of the IT personnel, training etc. It must cover all costs associated to the lifetime of the proposed information system (Dennis, et al., 2014).

The calculations for the total cost of ownership for the proposed information system for the FastDrivers is given below.

Conclusion 

The report will help the FastDrivers to understand the cost and project analysis for the project on developing the proposed information system, total cost of ownership, system designs, interface designs etc. The interface designs will help to understand how the user interfaces will look like and how the users will interact with the system. The ERD will help to understand the underlying database model and the data flow diagrams will help to understand how data comes from external sources into the system and flows through various processes of the system.

References

Bocij, P., Greasley, A. & Hickie, S., 2015. Business Information Systems. s.l.:Pearson.

Carlos Coronel, S. M., 2018. Database Systems: Design, Implementation, & Management. s.l.:Cengage Learning.

Dennis, A., Wixom, B. H. & Roth, R. M., 2014. Systems Analysis and Design. NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Valacich, J. S., George, J. F. & Hoffer, J. A., 2015. Essentials of Systems Analysis and Design. NY: Pearson.