First, what you need to do is a requirements analysis.
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Customers are usually allocated to sales staff on the basis of
geographical or industry division. This system must be able to do
the following functions:
There are two primary actors in your system. Customer, Sales
Staff
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1) Automatic allocation of new customers, prospects or
leads
a. Manage a customer and sales staff database
b. Allow automatic or manual allocation of new customers to Sales
staff based on preset criteria
1) Means that new customers will automatically be assigned to
gepgraphical location (e.g. Singapore) or industry division (e.g.
consumer electronics, clothings, foodstuff)
a. Means that the system must be able to VIEW / INSERT / UPDATE
/ DELETE customer and sales staff records. (with database of
course)
b. Means that the system will allow automatic or manual
(recommend manual) assignment of customers to sales staff. (many to
one relationship)
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2) Tracking the frequency of contact with customers
a. Monitors when the customer was last contacted
b. Generates a recommended list of customers that each Sales staff
should visit
2) Just record how many times the sales staff contacts each
customer. (To make it simple for you, but the more accurate
requirement is-> Number of contacts over a
period of time. e.g. 10 times per year)
a.) Use timestamp to record datetime in database per
contact.
b.) This requirement is very ambiguous (unclear)... you can
assumpt that the top ten customers that contact the sales staff
most often should be in the list.
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3) Analysis of customer base
a. Provide a report on the size of each sales territory.
b. Provide a report to recommend re-allocation of customers if
sales territories are not balanced
3) This is what you business students are suppose to be good
at.
Use pie charts, bar charts or whatever graphical report format
you think is suitable.
From your report,
I should be able to know total number of sales in each territory
in each year (history report).
I should be able to know how many customers (CURRENTLY)
from each terriotry should be relocated.
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System should include 1) Administrative Module 2) Customer
Allocation Module 3) Tracking Module 4) Report Module.
This is the minimun number of modules you should produce but if
you want to score high distinction, add another User Authentication
Module which is just a login portal to authenticate your users.
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This application should be Web-based which means you will need a
Web Browser (Firefox), Web Server (Apache), Database Server (MySQL)
to deploy and test your system.
You should choose PHP as development language but definitely not
C++.
Happy now?
