ABC Videos Business Need

John Smith owns three video stores and continues to maintain a strong niche market in a smaller town (fighting off the box machines and offering unique titles).  Over the past year, he has built his business up one store at a time.  He acquired each store and as a cost saving effort continued to use the legacy systems that were in place when he bought the stores.  With the addition of his last store, he has found that this situation to be untenable.  On several occasions he has had to move employees from one store to another to cover sick employees.  However, clerks from the different stores didn’t have access and weren’t familiar with the different rental systems.  John would like to develop a new rental system to support his growing business.  He has contracted you to complete a System Analysis and Design of a new rental system.  You will be required to provide him this report within the next four weeks.  He will make himself and his employees available for interviews to help support your requirements definition.

Some of his basic Requirements:

He would like to be able to view inventory of all three stores from any location.  Additionally, his older system does not provide different pricing rules for different media format; e.g., his current system treats all items as tapes and does not provide for unique pricing rules for different Media.  He wants to make his system more secure and have capacity for future growth.

It is a stand-alone business, not part of a larger organization (like Blockbuster).
Rents movies and games (WII, WiiU, Xbox 360,  and Sony Playstation 3).
A “video” can be in any medium:  DVD or BluRay
The rental charge may vary by medium. For example, game rentals are more expensive than DVDs.
The store sells snacks, used videos, used games, and new movies
Transactions are rentals or purchases
The input medium by which membership and Rental and Sales transactions are captured is not important. (You will choose the physical solution that meets your requirements)
Cash, debit, credit (No checks—we don’t trust people) Payments.
On completion of a rental, the customer receives a transaction report with ‘typical’ information on—use your judgment.-(use a receipt from your favorite video store to help here)
Each renter has a separate membership.
Each employee has a Log-On ID
The Manager is responsible for starting the system each day
He rents 1500 videos per day/Store weekdays and 2500/day/store on Fridays and Saturdays
Customer can query the system to view available inventory

Summary of Interview with John Smith, Manager 1, and Clerks 1 and 2 on April 18, 2014

The current system:  The current system consists of two Point of Sale terminals (Registers) that are connected to a single computer at that store (Pentium IV class) with a 60 GB HD.  He upgraded the original Windows XP to VISTA and now it is unstable and the system locks up.  This frustrates both the customers and clerks.  The Managers don’t like the early version of MS ACCESS.  They find it difficult to input new titles and they have no experience with the data schema.  The former owner had his teenage son build the database and no one has any corporate knowledge of its structure (the situation at all stores are similar-so consider the configuration the same).  In addition, the current system has not security protection-all employees have the capability to change data within the system.  John said that he only wants his managers to have the capability to update, delete, or modify information in the database.  John considers his system unmaintainable and estimates that he is loosing $1000 per/week using this system.  He wants to replace it.  This includes both Hardware and Software.  Other problems are that the employees do not like the command line functions and want a nice graphical user interface to use.  The Managers don’t like it because they have to manually print out sales report and put it into their accounting and payroll program.  (They really like their accounting and payroll program—they just want the new rental system to have the capability to send data electronically to the accounting program).  Additionally, John reiterated the fact that he wanted a central video data repository—not distributed.  He would liked to have these systems all networked together.  He would also like to have an online search of the inventory and an in store Kiosk.  John has told me that he has about $100,000 dollars to spend on a new system and would like it in 3-4 months.

This system is used for renting, DVD, Blu-Ray and Games, etc.).  He also sells used movies, games, and snacks.  He has a separate payroll and accounting system that he is satisfied with.  This system will send information to the Accounting system in a predefined format. (Don’t worry about this)