The Car Rental System

8/8/2019 The Car Rental System

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ASCF Car Rentals Page 1

A NETWORK FOR THE CAR RENTAL COMPANY

THE CAR RENTERS BUSINESS

“ACME Sure Fire Car Rentals” (ASFC Rentals for short) is a small but growing nationalcar rental company. They compete in niche markets where renters want cars with adifference, for example, a prestigious car for a special occasion, a off-road vehicles, 7 seatSports Utility Vehicles (SUV’s) for transporting larger numbers of people and a number of standard vehicles at low prices. ASFC Rentals has found that the business in standardrentals makes a good profit but the business is actually growing in the rental of the more‘non-standard’ vehicles like the prestige cars and SUV’s.

The company has now outgrown its small time rental and communications systems andneeds a more integrated company-wide vehicle booking and car management system if itis to compete. Also, there have been concerns about enforcing standard business rulesabout upgrading vehicles across the organization and some very embarrassing situations

where different customers have booked the same vehicle at the same time. Themanagement also want to ensure a consistent level of service across the organization andhave put in place business rules and standards of practice for its staff to try and achievethis.

ACSF Rentals currently operates the following numbers of offices:

Location No. of Offices

Adelaide 4

Albury/Wodonga 1

Ballarat 1

Bendigo 1

Brisbane 6

Cairns 1

Canberra 6

Dubbo 1

Hervey Bay 1

Mackay 1

Melbourne 8

Newcastle 2

Perth 4

Sydney 8

Wollongong 2




Regrettably, Darwin and Tasmania are not on the map – YET!

Each office has a customer service centre, a maintenance department, fuelling station,cleaning station, secure garage facilities, and a coffee and lounge area. ACSF Rentals pride themselves on looking after their customers. The fleet is not large, like the morepopular rental companies, but ASFC Rentals has some specialty vehicles like the

‘Stretch Hummers ’ that it rents for about $1200 a day and are very, very, very popular!Speciality vehicles like the ‘Stretch Hummers’ must be maintained and available asmuch as possible. Note that the Stretch Hummers only operate out of Sydney andMelbourne and there are only four of these. Occasionally they are transported on a trainfrom Melbourne to Sydney or the reverse for special occasions.

THE PROBLEM STATEMENT

ASFC Rentals executives believe that they have a problem with the booking, trackingand maintenance of their growing rental of vehicle fleet. The problems occur when cars thathave mechanical problems are rented, vehicles that have been double booked and there

have been cases when the wrong vehicle has been rented when it has been returned andnot serviced or cleaned.

ASFC Rentals intends to increase staff at its Melbourne HQ to include an operationscentre. It requires a networked computer based system to track bookings, track vehicles,help with accounting and help to manage operations.

Doing this will help ASFC Rentals executives plan better, make strategic decisions aboutfuture fleet composition and management and hopefully improve customer service andsatisfaction.

THE CONCEPT ASFC Rentals has employed consultants to provide an up front conceptual analysis forthe business, determine the feasibility of the project given the cash outlays and expectedreturns to the business and to recommend an integrated business and IT strategy toachieve the goal of managed growth.

Their original concept is to deploy a company wide ‘Intranet’. The central office will host acluster of servers and database to which the offices will connect. The ‘ business rules’ needto be built into the system as much as possible. Offices will need to connect to the centralfacility to make bookings and access the services and databases. There is no intention atthis stage to host local data-bases at the branch offices, but can change during the actualrequirements analysis if there are compelling and cost effective reasons.

The initial set of stakeholders for the system is:

• The Cl ient – The client is a three-person sub-committee of the executive of ASCF Rentals consisting of Mr. Albus Dumbledoors (Chief Executive), Ms. Angelina Pitt (Operations) and Mr. Justin Timberpond (IT Infrastructure).

• The Sponsor – The sponsor is the full executive of ASCF Rentals consistingof the members of the subcommittee that make up the clients and the




remaining three executives: Donald Notrumps (Fleet Management), The Rev. J.Howard (Finance) and Harry Potter Jr. (Marketing and Sales).

• End-users – Who at the outset were identified as the booking office staff andcentral office staff who need to maintain the system.

A diagram of the concept is given in Figure 11.

Figure 1 – A Concept for the Network

The system will consist of at least the following features.

• Making a booking, tracking bookings, and managing bookings;

• Vehicle maintenance, parts, upgrades and equipment scheduling;

• Profit and loss for each vehicle in the fleet;

• Vehicle location, status, replacement cost, book value, and calendar.

1 Don’t forget that this is just an initial concept taking into account the ideas of the clients, and some

end-users. The full requirements, architectural design, detailed design, coding, stakeholder analysisand all of the development activities, including quality assurance and testing, still need to be done.




THE PROJECT TEAM

The project team consists of you as chief project manager, and the team listed in Table 2.

Name DescriptionJohn Crease Has about 9 years experience in a variety of different domains but isthe acknowledged technical leader.

Herman Hassle Has about 6 years of experience in web applications but dreams of being in charge of building aircraft systems.

Kate Blanching Another recent graduate she has about 1 year experience.Lucy Lewis 8 years of experienceJamie Southland Called 24 by his university buddies because he keeps odd hours

and is also recently graduated.William Shattering Has about 6 years of experience but has even bigger dreams of Naomi Wotts Recently graduated.

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The Car Rental System