Construction and Rental Company rents tools and small equipment to the building

Question

Construction and Rental Company rents tools and small equipment to the building and construction industry. They have over 10,000 items available for rent. All items are stored in a single warehouse. Items are stored in an equipment table in the company's data base with the item serial number as the primary key. Customers select the items they want to rent and the sales staff enter the item serial number into the system to generate a rental agreement. When items are returned, the serial number is used to record the return and the system calculates the invoice. Recently, the company has lost sales because they cannot find items in the warehouse. A physical inventory resulted in a write-off of 10% of the inventory due to lost or stolen equipment. PWC is recommending the company implement an RFID system to better track the equipment within the warehouse and at the point of sale/return. Describe the key design elements for the system including the hardware and database elements (example, RFID tags must be attached to each piece of equipment).

Explanation / Answer

Maintaining records through manual entry resulted in lost of inventory items. Maintaining serail number as primary key in the table is not so effective in this case. Unique identification could be better in this aspect such as assigning each item with unique code and an extra column of this code should placed in the table. Making this code column as primary key could easily identify the selected item from company's warehouse.

RAID(Radio Frequebcy Identification Tags) are very much helpfull in tracking the item in desired way. As discussed above making this RAID codes as primary key in the database of comapny's ware house can identify the items accquartely.

To improve the security, redundant check of the rented items colud improve this scenario. The return policy should include appropriate time of return date of rented items. To monitor this a separate tracking table should maintain in the database and once the rented item returns this tracking table should automaticay update the inventory table.

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