| Crawford. Angela | |
Highland Farms Prospect Information Management SystemAngela CrawfordDecember 2003Advisor: Charles MasseyIn 1996, the UNCA CSCI 446 class created a system design for Highland Farms, a retirement community in Black Mountain. Mr. Massey then created a dBase system based on the design produced by the class. Over the years, the information captured and used by Highland Farms has changed, and the program is showing its age. In the spring of 2003, the users requested that the system be completely updated and converted into an Access database. Description The PIMS database tracks all prospective residents of the retirement community. The marketing director uses the system on a daily basis to add new prospective residents, to track communication with prospects, and to record purchase information when a new resident moves into the community. The database assists with a wide range of marketing functions; from printing labels to analyzing where advertising funds are best spent. The redesign of the PIMS system offered many challenges. The system needed to be altered to meet changing needs and uses, but also had to provide a user interface similar to the former system so that the users could immediately switch to the new system. Converting the existing data to the new system was also a very challenging process. Some tables had as many as 30,000 records that had to be moved into the new PIMS database. The new system is an Access 2000 database. I used extensive VBA
(Visual Basic for Applications) in order to achieve the necessary
functionality while still keeping the program in Microsoft Access,
as requested by the client. I was also able to extend my knowledge
of SQL (Structured Query Language) syntax by using it in many ways
throughout the project. |
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