Introduction:

Four Seasons restaurant was built in 1992 in the heart of

Bahawalpur. Its one of the hottest places for Chinese food and the best place for a
party. Wedding ceremonies are also held at the restaurant.
The restaurant is built on ¼ Acre of land with additional ½ acre of lawn at the back
of the restaurant where marriage ceremonies are held. It is one of the leading local
restaurants.
Investigation:
Interview with The Restaurant Manager:
On the arrival at the restaurant, I was greeted by the restaurant secretary. I
really appreciated his cooperation for giving me some time from his busy schedule
and he escorted me to the manager’s office. I was mesmerized by the atmosphere of
the restaurant and the dim lights enhanced the effect. I proceeded to his office and
after some preliminaries, we engaged into the formal interview.

Self: Who is the in charge of menu and prices?

Manager: The Hotel Manager is the in charge of all menu and prices.

Self: How often do you review your prices?

M: When we review about the raw materials we use in preparing that dish,
But normally the owner makes changes in our menu and prices once in a year.

Self: Which type of foods does your restaurant provides?

M: We offer Chinese, continental and sea foods and takeaways. Takeaways includes
all sorts of pizzas, steaks and other stuff.

Self: Which are your three most popular dishes?

M: People come here for Chinese food here chicken with Pineapple.

Self: Who is in charge for Food Inventory Purchase?

M: The Head Chef is the in charge for it.

Self: Is your food purchase is done separately for Chinese and continental dishes?
M: No, we have a contract with a company which deals with providing meat to
restaurants of the area so the meat Is purchased collectively. As far as vegetables
are concerned they are stored in the storage facility and also are bought together.

Self: How often do you buy the raw materials for your dishes?
M: Meat is bought on daily basis but the vegetables are bought every alternate day
or if a particular vegetable is required the chefs tell the head chef their demand and
we buy the grocery. Sea food is purchased on weekly basis.

Self: Do you have a record of your hottest selling dish?

M: No, we don’t maintain a record.

Self: What sort of drinks do you keep?

M: We keep almost all sorts of drinks, which includes both soft and hot drinks. We
have almost every popular non- alcoholic drink and we also do serve milk shakes
and Cold coffee. In hot drinks we offer Cappuccino, Green Tea, Pink Tea, Coffee
and Chinese Tea.
Self: Do you Buy your drinkables?
M: Yes, most of the soft drinks are bought but hot drinks are made by ourselves.

Self: Do you buy your condiments or make then yourselves?

M: We buy all condiments because we have to take care of the quality control.

Self: What happens when you have a wedding or a party? Do you take it as a
separate project?
M: Mostly, parties and wedding ceremonies order continental food. So our
continental chef and staff are busy in the preparations, this results in slight delay of
continental dishes orders. Yes, we handle it as a separate project and have separate
staff members for it.

Self: Are the employees’ paid on weekly or monthly basis?

M: They are paid monthly.

Self: What is the turn off ratio for your employees?

M: It is very low at least an employee works here for about 13 to 14 months. It is
this low because there is 5 % service charges on every dish which is served in the
hall of the restaurant, most of the share of the service charges goes to waiters of the
restaurant.

Self: What are your total overheads?

M: I am not going to tell you the exact figure but it approximately is Rs.150,000/-
inclusive of all utility bills.

Self: How are the overheads managed and how do you distribute them ?
M: There is no such system to distribute our overheads we only pay them from our
profits and total income of the month.

Self: What are the problems you are facing with the current system?
M: The main problem with the current system is that it is totally manual and we
have to maintain a lot of registers of different categories and it is a wastage of time.

Self: Well, thank you for affording me time in the busy schedule.
Manager: You are most welcome.

Thank you for your time.

2.2 Description of the Current System
Administration staff duties:
The restaurant has an Accountant, Head chef, the manager
and the owner. These four make up the administration staff of the restaurant.

The Accountant's duties depend largely on the efficiency and the accuracy of the
management registers. He holds the records of the daily payments within the
restaurant. And also take cares about the monthly payments, the payment of the
bills, he is responsible for processing the salaries of the staff and he is the one who
keeps the record of the attendance registers.

Head chef is the one who is responsible of taking care of the duties of the fried man
and all other staff who works under him. He is the one who take cares of the orders
and supervises the orders which are brought by the waiters.

The manageris the sole representative of the owner of the restaurant within it
because he supervises all that is going on in the restaurant. His first duty is to keep
healthy atmosphere in the restaurant, Second priority of his work is to keep good
relationships with the regular customers and should monitor the activities by all
means. The manger also takes the attendance of the staff everyday.

The Owner is a major role because he is the cause of the place and is responsible for
the establishment for such a marvelous place to celebrate and party. The owner also
checks the attendance at monthly basis because he has a chain of restaurants and
motels all over the country. The accountant’s also reports to the Owner and then he
verifies the accountant's books and registers.
Modules of the Current System
Module 1: Receiving the order

Module 2: Dealing with the customer

Module 3: Processing the Order

Module 4: Recording of orders and Writing Reports

Problems with the current system

1. The current system is expensive in the form of the stationery. This is because
the system requires every different register for every module of the system
like for daily orders, payment to the staff and the people bringing the raw
material.

2. The current system does not offer the safe keeping of the records. Receipts
and invoices are misplaced because there are a lot of transactions which are
made at daily basis.

3. Securtiy of the current system can also be tempered easily because all the
records are present in the same room.

4. The current system can be made fraudulent because recipts could be forged
easily when payment takes place. The receipts are ordinary receipt books
which can be bought from any stationary shop.

5. The current system is manual and takes a lot of work to handle the orders
and for data entry because there are a lot of purchases done at daily basis at
the restaurant.

6. Accounts management is very difficult for the accountant as there are a lot of
records including attendence and salaries of the staff apart from the
inventory purchase and overall budget of the retsaurant.
3. REQUIREMENTS OF THE NEW SYSTEM

3.1 OBJECTIVES OF THE NEW SYSTEM

1. The major objective of the new system is to automize the restaurant’s

manual system as there are increasing number of employees and customers.
This shoes that the current system uses quite a large amount of stationary, in
the form of cash registers and receipt books. A lot of time is consumed to
maintain those records and for the storage of all the records additional space
is required too. The new system should solve this problem by making use of a
database by storing all the information that was previously recorded in
several different registers in a storage room, now in one DATABASE.

2. The new system also aims at making the process of word searching faster as
the database has earch parameters which allow for direct access using such
criteria such as the number of any sort of dish.

3. Attendance of the staff members are stored, organized and can be sorted
efficiently by the database in respect of the obselete way to open the
attendence registers and mark there.

4. The menu items will be stored in the database, in this way orders are
managed efficiently and swiftly by maintaining the record of the orders at
daily, weekily or monthly basis.

5. Accounts can be dealt effiiently with the database by keeping all the records
of the payments including the salaries of the employees and other payments
given to food managing company. Details of the overheads will also be stored
in the database which previously consumed a lot of registers and time.

6. The proposed system will also be able to print invoices and receipts for the
orders and other payments done by the restaurant manager. Reports will be
automatically generated by the database as the owner wishes to see the
current situation of his restauarant or any other purpose.

7. The new system will have much improved security ystem as compared to the
old one because of the use of layered passwords and recorded time sessions
for a specified personnel.
4. CONSTRAINTS AND LIMITATIONS
4.1 Hardware
Monitor

A colour monitor is preferable. A VGA/ SVGA with 256 or more colours is most
suitable for better performance.

Printer

An Inkjet printer is most suitable because it is both afforable and has a good
printing quality which will be required for printing the receipts, invoices,
reports and other documents.

Keyboard

A keyboard is required to input the data and also can work as a subsitute for
mouse in case it is not provided.

Mouse

The mouse is used for easier navigation thriugh the databse and for input of
options and to carry out other fuctions like using the operating system.

Hard disk and RAM

A large hard disk is recommended because a database system stores a lot of

information so requires a lot of space for fast processing. I would advise them to
use a 3 Gigabyte hard disk as the least option. Recommended hard disk amd
RAM would be 10 Gigabytes and 256 kilobytes respectively for premium
performance.

Diskettes

A 3 ½ inch floppy diskette is required as the backup storage as the least option.
Re-writable or writable compact discs are recommended to be used as backup or
general storage in this way the data would be more secured because the compact
discs are virus free and have a high storage capacity as compared to 3 ½
diskettes.
4.2 Software

Microsoft® Windows 98

Windows is crucial in the sense that it is the running base for my application
development package, Microsoft Access.
Microsoft® Windows XP is recommended for enhanced performance because it
is a powerful operating system as compared to Microsoft® Windows 98. The
Databse will run in either of the two versions of Windows.

Microsoft® Office 2000

Office 2000 is mainly required for the data processing specially Microsoft®
ACCESS which is required to build my database. Office XP 2002 is a better
option which have few more functions than Office 2000 and my databse is built
using the specified software.

4.3 Cost
The restaurant will face a little cost of the new system as they don’t have a
computer. Buying a computer, updated software and recommended hardware
inclusive of an inkjet printer will be a little expensive but for once. As in the long
run this system will prove much cheaper than the obselete manual system which
included a lot of stationary. A Pentium® or an AMD® processor with speed of
600 Mhz should do the job.

4.4 Time Scale

The new system is expected to be implemented at the restaurant by April 2003.

4.5 Recommendations

The new system should be functional by January 2003 and at this time the
retsuarant should buy the upgrades and the recommended hardware to be used
in the system.
For implementation direct conversion is recommended as the current system is
totally manual and the computerized system should take over as soon as the
specified personnels are trained to use the new system.