Problem Description
Service match is an upcoming company based in Melbourne. Their primary purpose of business is to provide a platform where clients can access services, needed on a regular basis, easily. These services include heavy goods transportation, domestic and commercial cleaning, landscape and lawn maintenance and design, plumbing works, electrical works, construction and many more.
The business process starts with the registration of clients and service providers. Clients register with Service match using a registration form (Appendix A). After registered they can then request for quotes on a service. From the perspective of the company, the clients are mainly classified as corporate and individual clients. Corporate clients are those who require services for professional purposes and individual clients are those who require services on personal or household purposes. Service providers or businesses register (Appendix B) with the company with their details and are approached by the company if there is any suitable work for them. For each of the registered clients, the company keeps record of their name, address, phone number and email address. Apart from this basic information, the company also keeps track of property ownership circumstances of the individual clients. They want to know whether a client is a property owner or a tenant in a rental property. Service match uses registration information for promotional purposes. For the corporate clients, the company also keeps track of the business information such as name of the corporation and business area (Suburb). For the registered businesses, the contact person name, phone number, email address, business address and ABN number is recorded. Service match does not allow a business to register with them unless they have a valid Australian Business Number. The businesses are also required to specify their job industry, which is explained in a later stage. One business can be associated with multiple industries at the same time. Moreover, the businesses are mainly of two categories, i.e. corporate businesses, who are registered as a company and freelancers who are registered as single person service providers. Service match keeps the freelancers’ records separately as they offer some of the freelancers, free career seminars for continuous service improvement and business expansion.
When a registered client requires assistance from Service match, the person creates a job request by filling up a job request form (Appendix C). Jobs can also be of two main categories. Casual jobs are created by individual clients and are one-time events. On the other hand, contractual jobs are created by corporate clients and have specific contract start and end date. Each of the created jobs belongs to one of the predefined job industries. Each industry has a unique id and a title. As time goes, Service match plans to add more job types by targeting different industries. Also, the company keeps track of the trade unions that represent some of the industries listed by Service match. The officials believe that if they have listed unions’ contact details, it might be helpful to communicate easily with the businesses on a mass level. Each job is assigned a unique job id, a job description, a level of urgency and a job location (suburb). Once a job is created, based on the suburb, the nearby businesses who are affiliated with the same job type, are notified. The company maintains a list of adjacent suburbs for every suburb so that the search perimeter can be expanded. For assumption, each suburb is uniquely identified by the postcode. If no nearby business is found, ServiceMatch notifies businesses in the same industry.
The interested businesses provide quotes for each job requests based on the job description and urgency and then the client is notified by Service match. After evaluating the quotes and going through the reviews that each business has on their profile from previously performed jobs, the
client selects one of the businesses and the status of the quote changes to “selected”. The other two status a quote can have are “contacted” and “posted”. One job can receive many quotes from the businesses but the selection of business strictly depends on the client.
Once the job is completed by the hired business, the clients are encouraged to leave a review against a specific job. Service match keeps track of the reviews for future references. Each review has a unique id, a date on which the review was put down, a rating within the range of 0 to 5 and an optional review text. When a client fills up a review form as shown in Appendix D, it lets the client to put a maximum of 5 different reviews at a time. For the time being, ServiceMatch does not allow clients to leave reviews for a business, unless the job has already been assigned to them.
The payment system of Service match is simple. The invoice is generated against each job that has a unique invoice number and the amount to be paid by the client to the business. One job can have multiple invoices associated with it. Unless there is any disagreement between the client and the business, Service match do not interfere in the monetary matters.
There are other companies that provide similar services as Service match. To remain at the top of their game and increase popularity among the clients, Service match also offers their clients to hire equipment for daily usage so that they can do the job themselves without having to hire a business or buy expensive tools. The equipment Service match stores are mainly divided into two types. Electrical equipment have specific inspection date and before renting out any electrical equipment, the company ensures that the next inspection date is far ahead in time. This helps ensure the safety of the users. Mechanical instruments on the other hand do not have such fixed inspection dates. Although there are some machines which fall in both the categories. For example, the medium sized two-wheeler lawn mower that Service match owns, runs on electrical power as well as fuel power. Every equipment that the company rents are monitored using pick-up and drop-off dates along with different equipment status, i.e. “rented”, “available”, “overdue”. Every equipment has an associated maximum duration in days. Whenever, a rented equipment crosses the duration, the status is set to “overdue”.
Service match allows the freelancers to become a part of elite members’ club. Additionally, it also allows the trade unions to become elite members. The benefit of being an elite member is to get invitation to different career seminars which are free and beneficial for businesses to thrive. An elite member is a registered freelancer or a union representative but not all freelancers or unions are elite members unless they have registered to be one. The invitation to different career seminars are sent to the elite members periodically along with the seminar details, i.e. title, date and time, venue and so on. Many members can attend a seminar, but the company does not allow a seminar to take place if there are less than 5 attendees. This rule helps justifying the cost of arranging an expensive seminar.
As the company is a newly formed enterprise, they do not have an online system yet, which makes things a lot harder for the employees to keep the data and keep track on daily business transactions. So, before moving to an online management system Service match wants a relational database system that can cater for their entire business process and emerging volume of data.
TASK
You are required to develop an EER model for the above problem description. The EER should contain all necessary information such as entities, attributes, primary keys, relationships (including specialization/generalization if any), cardinalities, and participation (including (min, max)). All specialization/generalization and union type must be represented accordingly, instead being treated as simple association relationships. Any assumptions should also be stated clearly. If assumptions are made, it is important to make sure that the assumptions reflect possible real practice for a particular industry and do not contradict with the problem description above. Assignment should be typed, not written/drawn by hand. Use CASE tool or any software to draw figures in your assignment.
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