Data Base Managment Concepts

Introduction

Huffman Trucking is a company with a mission to be profitable, growing, and an adaptive company within a very competitive business setting. This company has a vision of being a model company to all stockholders, stakeholders, employees and customers. With such a immense vision and mission to complete, the Huffman Trucking company needs to consider updating their Fleet Truck Maintenance database. Our IT Project Team will be creating a design for the new database, along with a diagram and Power Point presentation to present to Huffman Trucking.

With this updated database, Huffman Trucking will see a more uniformed reporting process among each facility. Also, reports will be generated immediately upon data being entered. All of the following critical reports will be included within the new updated database: Inventory Tracking Report, DOT Inspection Report, Lube/Service Intervals Report, Fuel Log Report, Common Failure Analysis, and Operating Trend Analysis. With this new database system, new reports can also be easily created. It is the hope of our IT Project Team that Huffman Trucking will find the new database system to be easily operated and to have all the needs met for a growing trucking company.

Huffman Maintenance Database Design

After reviewing the SR-ht-003 service request Team C begins its work by first identifying the indicators needed to manage the maintenance on all Huffman trucks in the fleet. Listed below are the identified requirements needed to capture the data that will help provide managers with maintenance logs. These requirements are based on the Entities and Attributes for Fleet Truck Maintenance database created by a consulting company which started the initial project; as well as the reports requirement as stated by Danilo Radcliff, Vice President of Terminal Operations. Depicted below is 1N

The required fields identified will help to run reports for managers to track the needed servicing of the trucks. Some of the reports we are able to generate will be the: Inventory Tracking, DOT Inspection, Lube/Service Intervals and Fuel Log reports. With these reports appropriate maintenance of individual trucks will be easily identifiable. Team C will also be able to provide some statistical reports to enhance manager’s abilities to track and trend performance levels of the Huffman Fleet. The analysis that will be provided will include both Common Failure Analysis as well as the Operating Trend Analysis.

Team C created an organizational model that will help provide managers with a better understanding of the analysis tools. Each Vehicle ID is specific to an individual truck and each truck will have a maintenance log that will include Lube/Service, Inspection and Fuel information as well as dates and other supporting details. With data reports being extracted from these required fields, managers will be able to statistically trend the performance of the individual trucks and measure the improvements needed. This could potentially be a cost effective way to assure the Huffman Trucks are at maximum output while remaining within all safety regulations required by the State Highway Safety Laws.

Table 2: Organizational Model

After securing the required fields for the database repository, Team C went back to work to design the potential Entity-Relationship Design Model that will help Team C and the Huffman Trucking Fleet identify the information on the architecture of a relational database. “An entity relationship diagram at best can only be considered a static picture of the "structure" of a database”. (2007)