case study
Web-based software allows you to deliver a range of functionality and information over any or all of your browser based systems – your intranet, your password-protected extranet or your website. No longer tied down to individual desktops, LANs, or even the office, web-based software allows people to access your functions and information from anywhere, at any time.
MerrionIT has the in-house expertise to design and develop a wide range of web-based software applications. We can help you to define your processes and then develop a bespoke application that exactly suits your requirements
Customer Profile
Fun Fitness is a children’s play centre that caters for children’s birthday parties. They followed the traditional pencil and paper based business process for making bookings. I.e. the customer phones or comes into the Fun Fitness reception to book their birthday party. Fun Fitness fills in the booking form and makes the booking for the client.
As the business started growing, Fun Fitness realized that the management and booking of parties in different venues spread across multiple locations is getting tedious and complicated. Especially in the peak seasons (school holidays) keeping track of multiple bookings was getting difficult.
The combination of different party types with each party requiring different items, the possibility to choose between different dates and times was the reason why Fun Fitness felt the need of a good booking system to make this task as easy as possible.
Requirements
- The basic functionality of the system was to keep track of parties in different counties, venues and their equipment, and booking of parties by users.
- There should be a simple way of getting an overview of the bookings.
- The system should be interoperable with any platform and OS.
- A party booker should be able to reserve and cancel his/her own bookings and should be able to search for a parties with a certain property like county, venue, party provider and equipment.
- There should be an administrator that can administrate the whole system through the interface without writing any SQLqueries. This includes the management of add, edit and delete functions for every entity in the system including new users and their privilege management.
- The system should be a complete content management system for handling the reservations of parties, & equipment.
- The interoperability of the system should make it easy to access and use from different platforms.
- Communications module to keep track of all the communication w.r.t. each party booking
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Approach
The work began by contacting the people at the Fun Fitness Complex and an appointment was scheduled for the evaluation of their existing booking process. They showed how their existing pencil & paper process of reserving a party for a particular occasion/date worked.
With the evaluation of the existing process several sketches were drawn of the interface and basic functionality and user scenarios. The sketches together with the requirements of the system were an excellent background to make the EER diagram of the database that was needed to perform this complicated task.
The focus on the system was on the party event types and the users which makes the booking of the events. To get interoperability it was decided that the system should be web-based. Because of this, HTML together with an embedded scripting language .NET was used. The back-end of the system was chosen to be the relational database system named SQL Server.
Distribution of all the work and an agreement on how to put the system together was done and all code was put in a repository at the Fun Fitness Staging server using a common FTP-server. Then the implementation phase began with a lot of testing. The design and requirement analysis phase of the development was a very important foundation to start the implementation. This made it very easy to create the user interface from the sketches and distribute work among group members which lead to a quite good prototype.
Authentication to the system was done through a log on procedure where the party provider writes his/her user name and password. The user name and password is then verified against the database. If the log on succeeded the user will receive a privilege that the system has given to the user. There are four different types of privileges which are Viewer, Party Booker, Party Provider and Admin.
The viewer can look at parties and search for events, the booker can reserve and cancel his/her own bookings and the administrator can manage the whole system. The privilege that the user got is determined by what kind of access to the system it will have. The management of the log on session was handled by the .NET built in functions.
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Result
The system that has been created is a complete party booking system. It has functions for handling users with different privileges; it shows the party bookings in an intuitive way and has a fully administrative web-interface.
The booking schedule (day/week/month-view) can be seen which is an easy to use interface for managing party bookings. The availability of the events for a party on a particular date is shown in a calendar view with different colours.
The system has a complete administrative interface. The administrator can manipulate the whole database from the web-interface. Features like Add Booking, Edit Booking, and View Booking makes it easy for an administrator to manage the system. The administrator can also reserve and cancel any bookings made by the party bookers.
Conclusion
We have demonstrated our abilities to build a Party booking system with SQL Server as the back-end and a front-end in HTML embedded with .NET. It is easy to make party bookings in the graphical user interface and the day/week/month schema gives a good overview of the party bookings. The combinations of the search functions, the ability to book the party for any user and the ability to manage the whole database from the web-site made this system a very powerful administrative party booking system. The security model used based on different privilege for different users also makes the system a real-life application.
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