CHAPTER ONE
1.1 INTRODUCTION
1.2 BACKGROUND OF STUDY
Sparkle Laundry Services was established in 2011, and has grown from its humble beginnings to become the city’s premier commercial laundry service provider. Their services are catered to meet the needs of their customers both as an individual and as a business. With 21 locations in the city, their loyal customer base demonstrates Sparkle Laundry Services dedication to excellence. They have provided the community with over 20 years of quality service making them a household name in the city’s ever changing landscape.
1.3 STATEMENT OF PROBLEM
Laundry firm currently uses a manual system for the management and maintenance of critical information. The current system requires numerous paper forms, with data stores spread throughout the Laundry firm management infrastructure. Often information (on forms) is incomplete, or does not follow management standards. Forms are often lost in transit between departments requiring a comprehensive auditing process to ensure that no vital information is lost. This has lead to inconsistencies in various data due to large volume of contrasting customer details leading to mix-up of clothes in the laundry firm which thus leads to delay in collecting the clothes back. The problems faced here are:
1. Poor statistics about customers: this may be as a result of lost or misplaced customer records
2. Longer Waiting Time: The record clerk wastes so much time in bringing customer records. In case the management needs the record for a particular customer, it takes the clerk time to manually organize the data and bring it to the destination where it is needed. Thereby contributing to time wastage.
3. Inaccurate customer report: Sometimes customer reports are not properly stated and reported. Due to the traditional method of storing customer records, it is difficult to track customer records especially for reporting purpose.
4. Mishandling of customer records: Customer files are often handled with little or no regard. This leads to detaching and tearing away of some of the customers important documents.
5. Additional workload: The use of the manual system also creates an additional workload for the staff to keep and obtain the customer and staff information because this information is kept in a different file
