28-01-2013, 01:05 PM
STUDENT RESIDENCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
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Introduction
The University of the Western Cape (UWC) has decided that by 2010, the entire student registration process will be online. This vision implies that the student accommodation system should also be computerized and possibly become online based. The current accommodation application process involves students to fill a paper-based application form which takes a long time to process. The Student Residence Management System (SRMS) is introduced as a computerized system to ease the pressure on students and administrators. The new residence application system will help to eliminate the paper-based applications thereby speeding up processing as details will be captured in the database. This will help to eliminate the delays caused by the sequential checking of each residence for the availability of rooms. The system will check automatically for the available rooms to help accelerate the room allocation process thus making it painless for the managers to allocate rooms to students. At the present time, students must check for the successful or unsuccessful list of accommodation application at the residence administrator. Since the new system to be adopted is computerized, it will automatically send notifications to successful and unsuccessful applicants through email.
Current system
The current system of residence application is not yet computerized and this has made the process of application to be very slow and tiresome. During application, forms are provided to students who fill them by hand and deposit them to the Residence Office. The staff in charge classifies all the application forms and processes each case at time. The current system being manual, the management does not have updated records of vacant rooms or occupied rooms. To know whether there are still some vacant rooms, the person in charge has to go to the residence building and check physically. Also the lack of updated information about the room availability and their types causes some students to be allocated to the type of rooms they did not want. The manual system of residence management has another constraint of not accessing information from the students‟ database. The residence management staff does not get timely information about students who have been suspended from the university, who have failed, students who have not completed registration and payment, unless they go and request this information from the university administration.
Motivation
The idea of computerizing this system was introduced with a view to address the problems associated with the current residence management system. This project introduces a new online-based system of application for student residence which will facilitate students to book for the room they want without spending much time on the queue. Also this system will help the management staff to process the application and notify the students timeously. This must be achieved by enabling the residence management staff to access, timely, all student information from the UWC students database; and this system also will provide a facility of record keeping about room allocations and room availability.
Conclusion
After having observed the current problems in the system of student residence management and after seeing the vision of the UWC in the year 2010, this project was chosen as to provide durable solutions.
In this chapter described the characteristics of the current system. The next chapter looks at the user characteristics.