ACME Design Solutions - Group S3

Executive Summary

March 5,1996

System Overview

The project will entail the design and implementation of a hotel management system. This system is be designed to aid management and staff in hotel operations. This will cater to three main groups: management, front desk and kitchen staff. The main goal of this project is to automate the current system to be more convenient, accurate, reliable, and have pertinent information readily accessable to the staff at all times. This will also meet all the security and efficiency issues required.

Management's role in this system is to have complete control over all software functions. These functions will entail as follows:

Staff accounts (id)

Generate sales reports

Editing/Overriding general accounts (e.g. bill changes)

The front desk staff will be responsible for the majority of the system functions:

Room availability inquiries

Enter new reservations

Edit delete and change current reservations

Finalize bill payment

Receiving and entering phone messages into the system.

Room service orders will be processed through an online system and directed to the kitchen staff:

Online menu system

Entering and editing orders

Update customer accounts (food bill)

Transferring orders to cooks touch screen monitor

Overview of System Modules

The Front Desk Module

The Front Desk module of the system makes it possible to make reservations, leave messages for occupants, and print day to day reports. In order to have access to the front desk module the user should be a member of the front desk staff. Administrators will also have access to this part of the system. The screens for this module have been set up to look like the manual forms that were previously being used. The user interface for this module offers a very covinient and easy transition for employees from a paper based system to a computer based system. There should be minimal or no training required during this transition. Due to lack of time on-line help is not provided.

The Kitchen Module

The Kitchen Module of the system is strictly used for taking food orders for customers and printing receipts. The only people that have access to this module are the kitchen staff and administrators. The screen provides a menu section and a customer bill to add items to. The module is very user friendly because of the simplicity of the screen and the lack of buttons. The menu will look like the paper based version and the customer bill will be very similar to its paper based counterpart.

Administration Module

The Administration module is where all system update and maintenance is done, and for that reason, you must have specific access to use this module. From this module, administrators can execute many functions: modify customer bills; change room designations; add, update, and remove employee information; edit the room service menu, update the taxes charged and generate all reports previous compiled manually. All reports and other forms of printed output have been set up to look identical to hand written output and to use existing forms, thus reducing confusion with the new system's output. All functions within the module are set up to use a graphical user interface and thus, the transition from a paper based system to a computer based system, will be intuitive.

Essential Customer Requirements

In our view there are a few key elements that are essential to the development of a successful Hotel Management System. The system we are proposing has they following characteristics:

It will be user friendly and easy to use. The system must be used by a variety of staff at various levels. Since, many of the staff members are assumed to have little previous computer experience, a user friendly system is necessary to allow all staff members to take advantage of the system.
Efficient mechanism for data input and information searching. Since the system will be used while employees are dealing directly with customers, the system must encourage efficient data input and quick information searches. This will limit the number of delays.
The various modules of the system must be well integrated. There are three main modules that make up the system, front desk, kitchen/room service and administration. Information from each subsystem can be requested by another subsystem, therefore the system should provide easy access to this information. For example, a customer bill will include room charges, phone charges and room service charges. Another example is that a customer may request information about room service charges at the front desk or room service may request confirmation of room numbers from the front desk system.

Implementation Choices

We have chosen to implement this system using a commercially available database program and a PC platform. The PC platform was chosen to allow the Hotel to make use of existing hardware. Expanding the existing system is relatively inexpensive. There are many reasons for choosing a high level database package for implementation. This application is well suited to development using a database package and there have been many similar successful implementations. The graphical design promotes ease of use and user friendly applications. The opportunities to introduce bugs into complicated graphical implementations are reduced by using a higher level development tool. Your system does not become dependent on one company for maintenance and further development because that company is the only group that understands the source code. Also, once the system is successfully implemented, you retain the option of having someone in house who can become familiar enough with the system to create special reports and make minor modifications.