Devise a system that would help the owner of a car dealership to organise the business. The aspects that the owner needs help with are:A record of all stock has to be kept so that if a customer comes in and makes enquires about a specific car salesman can immediately inform them whether the dealership has such a car. I am computerising a car dealerships business system. The company currently looks for a certain make of car i. e. Ford (if all the records were filed by make) by looking at the Ford file section.

This is time consuming and not very efficient. If the company were looking for two specific requirements for a car i. e. a Ford Focus they would have to look through the Ford file section and extract all the Ford Focus records. This again is incredibly time consuming. If the user was looking for a specific requirement that did not match the fixed filing system i. e. a diesel or automatic car or a car under a certain price when the files have been sorted by make. They would have to search all the car files and extract all the required records this would be time consuming, not instant and would not make good customer service as it would take hours to collect all of the records.

To find a certain customer i. e. John Smith the user would look through the “s” section of the customer files (sorted into alphabetical order) until they found the correct file. All of these methods of collection are incredibly time consuming and the customer would have to wait along time in order to find the information they were looking for. This therefore makes the paper file system inefficient. To over come the above problems I would create a database to store all the information.

I would use two separate tables one for cars and one for customers. The car table would consist of all the cars that are owned by the company. It would store the same specific information about each car. The table would have queries attached to it in order to obtain the specific criteria that need to be met by the customer. The customer table would include a list of all the customers the company has recording the same specific information about each. The customer table would be kept in alphabetical order so the records were quick and easy to find.

The customer table would also be connected to a mail merge so that information could be mailed to the customers about special offers etc. This would create a letter, which could be either sent or emailed to a selected mailing list quickly and efficiently. The database would be made in Microsoft access and the mail merge would be made in Microsoft word. For the proposed system a database package would be more efficient than a spreadsheet package because the database package is designed around the concept of data and records.

E. g. a database consists of tables, records, fields, data types, relationships between tables, queries of data, built in forms, and generating reports. Whereas a spreadsheet package is designed around the concept of calculations and models. Instead of having a system of database word processing and spreadsheet packages from different manufacturers I would recommend using an integrated family of software packages by one manufacturer which all run under the same operating system. This is because the import and interchange of data between the packages is built into the integrated system software packages.