Maurice Carter owns a small estate agent situated in Seven Kings. He owns 51% of the company and he has a silent partner who owns 35% of the business and takes 30% of the profits once all the bills have been paid. Mr Carter employs 4 employees’ (Mr Patel, Mr Singh, Mrs Tsuchikawa and Miss Smith) who each take it in turn to take people to viewings and paper work. Each employee has houses that are his priority. As a new house is bought to the business it is given to an employee. Mr Carter works alongside the employee’s and does the same job as each of them.

To run their business they are required to keep the addresses of the property’s that they need to sell, the addresses of the property’s they need to rent, a list of property’s that have been rented and who is currently living there and they need a list of which property is assigned to which employee. At any given time there must be at least 2 employees’ in the office to man the phones. The person must take the details off the person and the details of the house they wish to sell/rent. Then it must be added to an employees’ list of houses’. The list alternate’s so everyone gets one in 5 houses going in alphabetical order.

The information is just written down on a piece of paper, which is then left on the designated employees’ desk. Each employee has a different way in which he or she then record the houses employed to them. Only the employee who has been given the detail’s for the house then has access to the house details. In the current system if the sheet on which the detail is recorded is lost then they have no means of contacting the client. If the sheet is given to someone who has to many house’s as it is then the customer may take his custom elsewhere as it takes to long.

Also as only the employee who is in charge of the house has access to the detail’s other employees can’t help if they no a customer interested in buying a house in that area. Also as the employee keep their client’s details in different ways if they lent it to someone else they can’t understand. Also when a client contacts wanting to buy a house in a certain area the employee contacted will only know the houses on sale in his or her files this may also lose the business money. I will be creating a system that will help my client to let all of the employees to have access to the database. It will be clear.

My client will be able to see all houses in certain areas and be able to see all house’s they have for sale their so if someone contact’s wishing to buy a house my client will be able to check the entire system for the type of house they want making them money. The main problem of the current system is that employee’s can only look at their own files and house’s so employees cannot help each other sell or rent houses. If they could do this then they would not only make more money for my client but they would ease their own workload. In the current system there is only one copy of each sheet which is a hand written version.

If this is lost then client details and the contact details are lost. If the client can not be contacted to regain there details the company loses money and if they can be contacted they think the company is unorganised. Employee’s record their details in different ways so even if they ask for help from another employee more than likely the employee will not be able to help as they will not understand their peers system. The advantages of the current system the way it is dealing with the weaknesses are that every employee knows what is expected of each of them.

If they lose their details then it is their pay packet which is damaged and Mr Carter’s overall profits at the end of the week. Everyone knows who to blame if something goes wrong. If an employee make’s too many mistakes it is them that loses their pay as they work on how many property’s they sell or rent so it is an incentive to work harder. The disadvantages of the current system the way it is dealing with the weaknesses are that if employee’s keep losing documents then when they are on the phone’s they may misplace notes which they are taking down.