Kim Lewis – Candidate Number: 5120
Definition – Nature Of The Problem to Be Investigated
Background to the organisation:
Rose Stead is a mobile hairdresser, based in Brixworth. She travels to client’s houses to cut, style and colour their hair. Rose has built up a loyal client base due to just over 5 years of business and her customer base is on the increase due to good reviews from clients spreading the word.
Rose is the only hairdresser in the business and therefore has to do all the paperwork herself, including calculating payments and booking customers appointments.
Brief Description Of Organisations Current Methods:
The organisation at present uses a paperbased system, with only one set ofrecord cards of customer details and a diary in which she notes down booked appointments.
The customer details are written by hand and some details have changed and the record cards have not been updated. Rose’s diary is also hand written and her notes are sometimes hard to read and untidy.
Problems With The Current Methods:
The paper based record card system is out of date and also there is no room to add/edit details so cards become messy and in some cases unreadable.
There is only one copy of all her customers details, so if lost, stolen, etc there is no back up to be used.
Also when searching for customer details, via record cards, it is an inefficient and time consuming method.
Rose sometimes books appointments without writing them down and double books certain times.
If appointments change her diary becomes messy and sometimes unreadable.
Again she only has one copy of her diary and if lost/stolen she would have no copy of her appointments/bookings to refer to.
Rose also has to calculate prices for her treatments herself and has been known to calculate wrong and charge the wrong prices to clients.
Rose Stead needs a database to organise her appointments and store her customers details, by creating a booking system this will eliminate the chance of double bookings and her customers details will be able to be edited and therefore kept up to date and she will be able to change them easily. She can also use the booking system to calculate how much each treatment costs in total and then have an accurate price for her customers.