Friday, January 31, 2020

System Analysis and Design of an Equipment Tracking Database Essay Example for Free

System Analysis and Design of an Equipment Tracking Database Essay BG Group has been active in the energy sector in Trinidad Tobago since 1989 and established an office in the country in 1994. Currently the company’s office is located at 5 St. Clair Avenue, St. Clair, Port-of-Spain. Today, BG Trinidad and Tobago (BG TT) is one of the Group’s core operational areas and is virtually unique among the multinationals based here, in operating onshore and offshore assets in all key areas of the country. The UK-based BG Group is a global leader in the exploration, production, distribution and supply of natural gas to industrial markets. The Group has operations in over 25 countries, including the UK, Egypt, Kazakhstan and India. The Group’s key business is the connecting of high value markets to competitively priced gas, to which it deploys expertise at all stages of the gas chain. BG TT has upstream operations in three main areas – the offshore East Coast Marine Area (ECMA) and North Coast Marine Area (NCMA), as well as the onshore Central Block located in the Moruga forest. The BG Group-operated ECMA or Dolphin gas field, located 83 km off the east coast of Trinidad, commenced production in March 1996. The Dolphin field is contracted to supply gas to NGC under a 20 year supply contract. The ECMA also supplies Atlantic Train 3 and Atlantic Train 4. NCMA comprises three producing fields, Hibiscus, Chaconia and Ixora, which supply natural gas for Atlantic LNG Trains 2, 3 and 4. A 107 km, 24-inch pipeline from the NCMA development to Point Fortin is the longest pipeline in Trinidad Tobago. A fourth producing field, Poinsettia, is scheduled for development in 2008. BG TT acquired Aventura’s 65% interest in, and operatorship of, the onshore Central Block in 2004. Central Block is conveniently located near the Cross Island Pipeline in Moruga, which makes it an attractive proposition for the supply of natural gas to Atlantic LNG. On acquiring the Block, they also took on an existing domestic gas supply agreement with the Petroleum Company of Trinidad Tobago Limited (Petrotrin). The transportation of this natural gas to the NGC network constitutes BG TT’s first sales of liquids in the country. 1. Problem Description: This project will provide guidelines for implementing an asset tracking solution at BG TT’s IM (Information Management) department. The system is needed to assist the Helpdesk Administrator to keep track of a large variety of physical computer equipment as they are bought, stored and assigned to the company’s employees. Currently there is a manual system that entails the use of a notebook to record and track the assignment of computer and computer related equipment. Inventory levels are checked periodically and recorded using the manual paper system. The most common method for tracking assets is to record transactions as they happen. As a result inventories are time consuming and almost impossible to maintain accuracy since assets move around on a daily basis. Also the data collected during any inventory is outdated before the finished reports are published. An asset tracking system needs to be able to produce reports that will help the organization make intelligent business decisions. The department wanted to streamline its equipment checkout process. The objective is to computerize the current manual process in order to make the equipment checkout processes fast and accurate. The computerization of this process will simplify paperwork and provide electronic storage of data. Because of the amount of equipment to be checked out every day and the number of members involved, the workload for staff members in the department increases every year. The operating cost includes the maintenance cost of the equipment and their inventory. Some of the problems faced by the staff members are listed below: †¢ Each piece of equipment is individually marked for identification purposes; however, there isn’t a method to allow a user to backtrack or check into certain equipment in terms of its usability and for maintenance purposes. This often leaves the user with an uncertainty on how good the equipment is in a given. Lack of information on the status and maintenance of equipment leads to bad quality of equipment because of unperformed maintenance. This, in turn, may cause customer dissatisfaction when poorly conditioned equipment is being given out. †¢ Manually completing forms creates another issue due to hand-writing. That is, more than one person will be handling the forms and each person has a different style of hand-writing. This leads to misunderstanding of the information on the forms, especially when maintenance requests are entered by one staff member and not understood properly by another staff member. †¢ Forms could be easily misplaced, thus resulting in missing documents. Human errors on checking forms for completeness could result in incomplete form. †¢ The equipment check-in and checkout processes are difficult and involves extensive labor to get the work done right. Currently, a staff member is required to manually check each equipment that is being checked out for the day and make sure things are getting checked in correctly. On top of that, the staff member is required to tally up all equipment before closing of the business on that day to make certain that all equipment are in place; otherwise, they may have equipment shortages and may have to reorder. 2. Proposed Solution: The aim of this project is to develop the inventory system that can be applied in the current IM Department. The objectives are: †¢ to identify the problems involved in the implementation of the current inventory system; †¢ to identify the needs of a systematic inventory system; †¢ To develop the prototype of the inventory system that can be implemented. The eventual inventory system will be a DBMS that will control the organization, storage, management, and retrieval of data in a database. The DBMS will accept requests for data from the application program and instructs the operating system to transfer the appropriate data. When a DBMS is used, information systems can be changed much more easily as the organizations information requirements change. New categories of data can be added to the database without disruption to the existing system. The proposed DMS will have the following basic features: †¢ Provides a way to structure data as records, tables, or objects †¢ Accepts data input from operators and stores that data for later retrieval †¢ Provides query languages for searching, sorting, reporting, and other decision support activities that help users correlate and make sense of collected data A Database Management System (DBMS) is a software system that enables users to define, create, and maintain the database and provide controlled access to this database. The DBMS is the software that interacts with the users’ application programs and the database. Typically, a DBMS provides the following facilities: †¢ It allows users to insert, update, delete and retrieve data from the database usually through a Data Manipulation Language (DML). Having a central repository for all data and descriptions allows the DML to provide general enquiry facility to this data, called a query language. The provision of a query language alleviates the problems with file-based systems where the user has to work with a fixed set of queries or there is a proliferation programs, giving major software management problems. †¢ It provides controlled access to the database. For example, it may provide: ? An integrity system, which maintains the consistency of stored data; ? A user-accessible catalog, which contains description of the data in the database. The proposed solution takes care of the CRUD features of the database software namely the following: a. Create the storage structures – It implies that the storage structures can be created and modified for the change in the database or the information system.

Thursday, January 23, 2020

The Ants and The Bees: Comparing the Social Structure of these Colonia

A queen, drones, and workers share a common place in life. They all live in a bee and ant colony striving together to accomplish their specific jobs. Living in a world where females are your workers and protectors of the queen, and drones are used to multiply the colony, and then die. When you look passed the buzzing of ants, you see a very sociable creature working like a well oiled machine. When you hear the dirt on the bees, they may look sociable, but deep down, it’s another world. A world where queens kill sibling sisters, and the drones are ejected out into the cold to starve just for the sake of their colony. Where females defend the nest and die 100% of the time after the sting. Bees and ants, both considered sociable insects, have a very different view on sociability. The colonies of ants and bees are broken down into several different categories. The top of the chain consist of the queen in both colonies. The colony depends on the queen to produce the eggs for their survival. This is the only function for the queen. She is able to choose what gender the eggs will become by fertilizing or not fertilizing them. She is capable of keeping the balance of the colony in check by choosing the gender of her eggs. Unfertile eggs become the drones of the colony, where fertile eggs becomes the female workers. The males, or drones of the colony serve only one purpose, and that is to fertilize the eggs. The drones do no maintenance work, no tending to the colony, no foraging, and they shortly die after mating with the queen. The workers of the colony are all female and mostly foragers, but some do have different task within their society (Stanger et al., 1971, p.10-11). The same can be implied to the ant colony which is made up of ... ...ned (Layton, 2008, p.1). They clamp on with there mighty jaws, rotate in a circle, and sting their victim while still clamped on. Some ants do not have a stinger. They simply drop poison unto their victims skin. Bees and ants live in a social nest setting, where there is a queen, drones, and workers. At first glance they may seem to be almost the same, one with wings and one without. Storing honey for rougher seasons and times, protecting by stinging, and having different types that are more harmful than others. At a closer look, ants are more the social creatures than bees. Living with more than one queen and sharing the neighboring colonies workers. Bees seem to live a more a closed off, mobster type. The queen killing off her sister rivalry to rule over the colony. Bees and ants may be similar in social structure, but different when you get down to the dirt.

Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Limitations: Sample and Respondents

————————————————- Limitations The market research process carries many limitations. It is important to recognize these limitations as they can lead to less accurate or bias results.. The following points are recognized as limitations that must be addressed. * Method used * Respondents to the method * Time constraint * Resources Method used: When sampling our population a non-probability sampling method was chosen known as convenience sampling. This method possesses limitations which must be taken into consideration.Due to the nature of the method it can often have a poor reflection of the whole sample. In this research it has been found that through our method, younger age students are the students who are answering the surveys. Also a majority of respondents were from the business faculty rather than the arts, science etc. These factors can all limit the accuracy of the re sults. Respondents to the method: Corresponding with our chosen method is the limitation of accurate results due to respondents responses. They may give an answer that is not necessarily accurate due to laziness or inconvenience.The online surveys are also limited as researchers do not receive detailed knowledge or reasoning of why people have put certain answers. Internet surveys can also lead to misunderstandings and it may be hard to follow up respondents, as you may not know who has answered the survey. Time Constraint: Other limitations that should be recognized is time. Due to the duration constraint placed upon the research process, limitations arose. Through more time the market research could have been done in a more detailed and thurrer manner using the most effective method.Resources: The resources available also limited us to get the most accurate results as possible; we were not able to get a list of all Macquarie students to ensure a more accurate reflection of the pop ulation was used. Also It is known that experience of the actual researches themselves can vary results. Inexperienced researches may not use the best survey method and may subconsciously jump to conclusions throughout the research. As this is our first time conducting such research limitation occur due to this. ————————————————-Recommendations for overcoming limitations The method used did tend to limit the accuracy of our research. This could be overcome by using another method, one categorized under probability sampling such as simple random sampling would produce a more accurate reflection of the sample and there would be less room for a bias result. Respondents may also give conclusions that are not accurate. This can be overcome by assuring the survey is simple, easy and clear. It could be done in many languages to overcome limitations with students who do not speak fluent English.The issues with time had an impact on the richness of research. To follow respondents up with interviews or any further questions, the survey could include a space for the respondents email. This could also enable in depth interviews to create a deeper understanding of respondents answers. Lastly the fact that this research has been carried out by inexperienced first time researchers is a limitation. This can be overcome through advice from professional researchers in order to achieve the most accurate results possible.

Tuesday, January 7, 2020

Effective Teaching - 1164 Words

Professor Kerry Jones EN 106 September 11, 2013 Effective Teaching Education is something that constantly has to change with the changing world. Change is an evolutionary process. â€Å"We cannot continue to educate our children for factory work but educate for creativity.† (Hetland 66) With this change comes new forms of learning. Students today are technophiles. They love their video games and they can’t put down their smart phones, iPods, and social networks. The challenge for working in the electronic age is that we have so much access to information but we still have the same brain we always had. The problem is not access to information. It is integrating that information and making sense out of it. Students must learn to use†¦show more content†¦To help students gain confidence in higher-order thinking with complex text, effective teachers gradually increase task complexity, moving from lower-level to higher-level task. Many students believe that reading informational text is a waste of time because they can just search the web for what they need at that time. Effective teachers get their students to believe the text is important to get the students to read it. For teachers to increase the perceived value of reading is to help students understand how reading the text benefits them across a range of situations. Effective teachers give students opportunities to apply the informational text they read to concrete classroom task. Effective teachers set up frequent opportunities for collaboration to support students’ social motivation for reading informational text. Social interaction around text has to be well managed to ensure that students listen to one another. The students get to use creativity making new things and makes old things new. Students build on one another’s thoughts to explain the major theme of the text by successively adding key elements as they take turns contributing to the synthesis. 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