ABSTRACT

This application presents a data management system for a car rental company. This enables the administrator to keep track of all the customers information. This system increases customer retention and simplify vehicle and customers management in efficient way. The car rental management system has a very user-friendly interface. Thus, the users will feel very easy to work on it. By using this system admin can manage their rental, bookings, customer issues and vehicle issues etc. The car rental information can be added to the system, or existing information can be edited or deleted by the administrator. The transaction reports of the car rental system can be retrieved by the administrator, when its required. Thus, there is no delay in the availability of any car information, when ever needed the car rental information can be captured very quickly and easily.

 

 

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Overview

As the internet improves the life of people, it also gives access to things that were inaccessible before. The internet is one of the most important tools of communication. The world has become a place where there is a lot of technological development which brings the result of almost every single thing has been transformed into computerized form. These days, individual activities have been changed into work done by information systems. One of which is the primary objective of this project which is about car rental management system. Renting car system exists in the previous years where people rent cars for their own reasons. Car rentals is basic to numerous individuals’ arrangement to travel or move from one place to another for business purposes, tour, and visit occasions. Thus, car rental is extremely useful.

My car rental management system is a web-based system for an organization that rents out cars. This system empowers the organization to make their services accessible to the public through the web and furthermore keep records about their services.

 

Background and Motivation

Background

Car rental has been around for over a century! When cars were introduced to people, clever entrepreneurs identified a growing demand for renting. However, before cars are invented, people would still rent out horses and carriages. Even in ancient Rome, chariots were rented. The earliest records of car hire can be traced as far back as 1904, when a bike shop in Minneapolis began offering vehicles for rent. A couple of years later, the German company, named “Sixt Car Hire” was built up in 1912. It previously began with three vehicles for rent and immediately extended. In 1915, in Omaha, Nebraska, Joe Saunders had a moment and understood that no one in Omaha offered vehicles for renting. He employed only one salesperson, Frank Arndt, from Germany, and began renting Arndt’s Model T. This endeavor ended up successfully that by 1917, he was renting

120 of these. He named the organization ‘Saunders Drive-It-Yourself System’ and put an advertisement in the local paper. Joe Saunders’ three siblings and father began participating in the business and by 1927, the Saunders System had branches in more than 85 urban areas.

The information technology nowadays is growing from time-to-time, consequently, the requests of utilizing Internet are expanding year-by-year. Furthermore, most of the traditional companies are moving their traditional business model into the modern business model. With the emergence of globalization and modernization supported by information and communication technology today one could easily tell that its story has changed and transformed. These gave birth to the numerous problems we have today in the car rental companies. Unlike before where all the processes when renting a car are done manually. However, this is neither effective nor efficient; customers are constantly not satisfied with the manual car rental processes.

Motivation

In consideration with historical and rapid development of car rental companies, the way processes in the companies are taking place today which is quite problematic, this project is planned to ease those processes through developing an effective and efficient car rental system, just like other developed countries are using technologies towards facilitating their customers processes through projects like Sixt Car Hire, Germany.

 

Statement of the Problem

The manual car rental system provides services only during office hours. So, customers have limited time to make any transactions or reservation of the cars. The problem with some of the current system is that some small companies already have a car rental system which is not a web- based application. This is a limitation that gives them capability to store customer’s details, but at the same time they cannot make their services more available to the public through the internet, they rather make use of posters to advertise their services to the public. They also make use of phone call reservations which is also limited to few features as compare to a web base system. For example, a customer might make a phone call reservation for a particular car, but when he/she comes to pick the car, he/she might turn not to like the car, this could be because the customer could not see a sample picture of the car, he/she wants to rent. Below are some problems with running car rental company manually:

• To rent a car, a prospective renter must first go to the nearest office to register as a client, what of if the customer doesn’t have enough time to do that?
• Cars that provide difficulties to rent out are normally advertised in local or national It involves a lot of paper work and consumes time.
• The process of managing customer’s data is slow if the company is using manual system and there might be thousands of
• It is very hard to keep record of all rental cars and so

 

Aim and Objectives

From the above-mentioned problems, the aim is to develop a computer-based information system that will help to address the ongoing issues from the manual information system and help to facilitate some tasks that seems to be difficult for both the car rental company’s staff and those who are renting the cars (customers). The main objective is to design and implement a car rental management system for an organization. Specific objectives are:

• To develop a simple and secure system that protects client information and confidential information of the organization
• To design a user-friendly system that enables client check for availability of vehicle and book or reserve a vehicle
• To design a system that enables clients pay their car rent online
• To develop a system that stores bookings and reservations information as well as payment history to help the organization keep track of
• To implement geofencing and remote car deactivation upon expiration of rental

 

 

Significance of the Project

Projects provide a flexible framework for engaging students in exploring curricular topics and developing important skills, such as communication, teamwork, and technology skills.

The car rental management system will help to solve numerous problems associated with the manual way of doing things. Errors, waste of precious time and energy will be eliminated with the system. This will in turn enhance productivity and efficiency in an organization.

Also, it would help students and researchers that are working actively towards enhancing the car rental management system, this work would serve as a reference to them as they strive to develop the car rental company technologically. Additionally, issues of insecurity, trustfulness could be resolved, because payment system would be linked to the system to eliminate these issues between people and the scammers as well as customers and the company’s staffs.

 

Project Risks Assessment

Table 1. 1 Risk and Prevention

 

RISK	PREVENTION

 

Loss of power	There is likelihood of loss of power when working on the project. To avoid that, the laptop used last for nearly five hours which is good enough between the times taken to bring back the light.
Inability to carry out research due to loss of hardware or software resources	Required hardware will be bought instantly while relevant software that may likely be lost will be kept in the computer for easy repair or reinstallation.
Loss of work due to equipment failure /loss	Weekly data backup to portable hard drive
Lack of Internet access	To prevent lack of internet access, two means of internet access was provided purposely for this project, which is not from the same ISP and one is wired whereas the other one is wireless.

 

Scope/Project Organization

The aim of this project is to develop a web-based car rental management system. At this stage of development, the project would be launched using IIS Express web server which already comes along with Visual Studio.

The remaining part of this project is organized as follows:

Chapter Two contains literature review; historical overview of the system and some related works and incredible achievements made by other researchers and entrepreneurs towards enhancing car rental company and the current implemented functionalities which will help in deciding what to add, remove or which part of the system to enhance to reflect the modern way of carrying out those processes.

Chapter Three primarily covers the analysis and design of the system, which are noted after intensively and carefully chosen the development methodology and how the methodology would be approached. In the analysis part, combination of data gathering techniques such as interview and observation were used to gather the data, followed by the modelling that depicts the logical model of the system and the subsequent design that shows the physical design of the system.

Chapter Four comprises the implementation of the system, the programming language used, test cases i.e. the functionalities tested and some errors encountered during the development, those that are resolved and those that are not.

Finally, Chapter Five defines the project evaluation, conclusion, further studies as well as recommendation. Evaluation are literally the assessment of the project with respect to its objectives and subjective, followed the expected further studies then at the end the conclusion.