System Analysis and Design of an Equipment Tracking Database Essay Example for Free

System Analysis and Design of an Equipment Tracking Database Essay BG Group has been active in the energy sector in Trinidad Tobago since 1989 and established an office in the country in 1994. Currently the company’s office is located at 5 St. Clair Avenue, St. Clair, Port-of-Spain. Today, BG Trinidad and Tobago (BG TT) is one of the Group’s core operational areas and is virtually unique among the multinationals based here, in operating onshore and offshore assets in all key areas of the country. The UK-based BG Group is a global leader in the exploration, production, distribution and supply of natural gas to industrial markets. The Group has operations in over 25 countries, including the UK, Egypt, Kazakhstan and India. The Group’s key business is the connecting of high value markets to competitively priced gas, to which it deploys expertise at all stages of the gas chain. BG TT has upstream operations in three main areas – the offshore East Coast Marine Area (ECMA) and North Coast Marine Area (NCMA), as well as the onshore Central Block located in the Moruga forest. The BG Group-operated ECMA or Dolphin gas field, located 83 km off the east coast of Trinidad, commenced production in March 1996. The Dolphin field is contracted to supply gas to NGC under a 20 year supply contract. The ECMA also supplies Atlantic Train 3 and Atlantic Train 4. NCMA comprises three producing fields, Hibiscus, Chaconia and Ixora, which supply natural gas for Atlantic LNG Trains 2, 3 and 4. A 107 km, 24-inch pipeline from the NCMA development to Point Fortin is the longest pipeline in Trinidad Tobago. A fourth producing field, Poinsettia, is scheduled for development in 2008. BG TT acquired Aventura’s 65% interest in, and operatorship of, the onshore Central Block in 2004. Central Block is conveniently located near the Cross Island Pipeline in Moruga, which makes it an attractive proposition for the supply of natural gas to Atlantic LNG. On acquiring the Block, they also took on an existing domestic gas supply agreement with the Petroleum Company of Trinidad Tobago Limited (Petrotrin). The transportation of this natural gas to the NGC network constitutes BG TT’s first sales of liquids in the country. 1. Problem Description: This project will provide guidelines for implementing an asset tracking solution at BG TT’s IM (Information Management) department. The system is needed to assist the Helpdesk Administrator to keep track of a large variety of physical computer equipment as they are bought, stored and assigned to the company’s employees. Currently there is a manual system that entails the use of a notebook to record and track the assignment of computer and computer related equipment. Inventory levels are checked periodically and recorded using the manual paper system. The most common method for tracking assets is to record transactions as they happen. As a result inventories are time consuming and almost impossible to maintain accuracy since assets move around on a daily basis. Also the data collected during any inventory is outdated before the finished reports are published. An asset tracking system needs to be able to produce reports that will help the organization make intelligent business decisions. The department wanted to streamline its equipment checkout process. The objective is to computerize the current manual process in order to make the equipment checkout processes fast and accurate. The computerization of this process will simplify paperwork and provide electronic storage of data. Because of the amount of equipment to be checked out every day and the number of members involved, the workload for staff members in the department increases every year. The operating cost includes the maintenance cost of the equipment and their inventory. Some of the problems faced by the staff members are listed below: †¢ Each piece of equipment is individually marked for identification purposes; however, there isn’t a method to allow a user to backtrack or check into certain equipment in terms of its usability and for maintenance purposes. This often leaves the user with an uncertainty on how good the equipment is in a given. Lack of information on the status and maintenance of equipment leads to bad quality of equipment because of unperformed maintenance. This, in turn, may cause customer dissatisfaction when poorly conditioned equipment is being given out. †¢ Manually completing forms creates another issue due to hand-writing. That is, more than one person will be handling the forms and each person has a different style of hand-writing. This leads to misunderstanding of the information on the forms, especially when maintenance requests are entered by one staff member and not understood properly by another staff member. †¢ Forms could be easily misplaced, thus resulting in missing documents. Human errors on checking forms for completeness could result in incomplete form. †¢ The equipment check-in and checkout processes are difficult and involves extensive labor to get the work done right. Currently, a staff member is required to manually check each equipment that is being checked out for the day and make sure things are getting checked in correctly. On top of that, the staff member is required to tally up all equipment before closing of the business on that day to make certain that all equipment are in place; otherwise, they may have equipment shortages and may have to reorder. 2. Proposed Solution: The aim of this project is to develop the inventory system that can be applied in the current IM Department. The objectives are: †¢ to identify the problems involved in the implementation of the current inventory system; †¢ to identify the needs of a systematic inventory system; †¢ To develop the prototype of the inventory system that can be implemented. The eventual inventory system will be a DBMS that will control the organization, storage, management, and retrieval of data in a database. The DBMS will accept requests for data from the application program and instructs the operating system to transfer the appropriate data. When a DBMS is used, information systems can be changed much more easily as the organizations information requirements change. New categories of data can be added to the database without disruption to the existing system. The proposed DMS will have the following basic features: †¢ Provides a way to structure data as records, tables, or objects †¢ Accepts data input from operators and stores that data for later retrieval †¢ Provides query languages for searching, sorting, reporting, and other decision support activities that help users correlate and make sense of collected data A Database Management System (DBMS) is a software system that enables users to define, create, and maintain the database and provide controlled access to this database. The DBMS is the software that interacts with the users’ application programs and the database. Typically, a DBMS provides the following facilities: †¢ It allows users to insert, update, delete and retrieve data from the database usually through a Data Manipulation Language (DML). Having a central repository for all data and descriptions allows the DML to provide general enquiry facility to this data, called a query language. The provision of a query language alleviates the problems with file-based systems where the user has to work with a fixed set of queries or there is a proliferation programs, giving major software management problems. †¢ It provides controlled access to the database. For example, it may provide: ? An integrity system, which maintains the consistency of stored data; ? A user-accessible catalog, which contains description of the data in the database. The proposed solution takes care of the CRUD features of the database software namely the following: a. Create the storage structures – It implies that the storage structures can be created and modified for the change in the database or the information system.