Department - Author 1
Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Department
Degree Name - Author 1
BS in Industrial Engineering
Date
3-2017
Primary Advisor
Rob Connelly
Abstract/Summary
BoltAbout was started by 4 Cal Poly students, and their COO is a fellow Industrial Engineering student that I met during the first half of the senior project series class. He presented the project to me and I decided to work with him in developing this new database for his startup company. BoltAbout’s customer base is growing and current operations are not fit to meet the demand of a growing company. More specifically, their data management system can’t be used by all current employees to perform essential tasks such as rental processing, bicycle and equipment organization, and customer data analysis. This is the origin and need for this project. The end goal was to design a completely new database with an appropriate structure and user friendly interface that would allow all employees to utilize it efficiently. The current and future needs of the company were used as the main requirements for the database design, this decision would ensure that the database is functional today but also five years down the line.
The final design meets the need for a simpler and more intuitive user friendly interface with a main form that serves as a starting point for all functions or tasks employees might need to perform. From this main form, a user can simply click a button to go to a form to either register or update a customer, register new equipment, add equipment maintenance details to the maintenance log, create, edit, or end a customer order, and view statistics about their monthly performance. All these tasks are one click away. As a conclusion, the design successfully meets BoltAbout’s needs for a simpler and functional data management system. In addition, it allows for flexibility if the company wants to add a new product line or different additional equipment models in the future with minimal to no changes required to the database structure or design. Future recommendations would be related to data security. Currently, to be able to fully use the database and all its operations, the user needs to have access to all the information. As the company and the employee base grows, this availability to information might have to be limited or address as a potential area of improvement.
URL: https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/imesp/201