CASE STUDY

Personal Trainer, Inc.

Personal Trainer, Inc., owns and operates fitness centers in a dozen Midwestern cities. The centers have done well, and the company is planning an international expansion by opening a new “supercenter” in the Toronto area. Personal Trainer’s president, Cassia Umi, hired an IT consultant, Susan Park, to help develop an information system for the new facility. During the project, Susan will work closely with Gray Lewis, who will manage the new operation.
Background:
 After evaluating various development strategies, Susan prepared a system requirements document and submitted her recommendations to Cassia Umi, Personal Trainer’s president. During her presentation, Susan discussed several development strategies, including in-house development and outsourcing. She did not feel that a commercial software package would meet Personal Trainer’s needs. Based on her research, Susan felt it would be premature to select a development strategy at this time. Instead, she recommended to Cassia that an in-house team should develop a design prototype, using a relational database as a model. Susan said that the prototype would have two main objectives: It would represent a user-approved model of the new system, and it would identify all systems entities and the relationships among them. Susan explained that it would be better to design the basic system first, and then address other issues, including Web enhancements and implementation options. She proposed a three-step plan: data design, user interface design, and application architecture. She explained that systems analysts refer to this as the systems design phase of a development project. Cassia agreed with Susan’s recommendation, and asked her to go forward with the plan.
Assignments



 1. Review the Personal Trainer fact-finding summary in Chapter 4 and draw an ERD with cardinality notation. Assume that system entities include members, activities and services, and fitness instructors.

Students should focus on three main entities: members, activities and services, and fitness instructors. In addition, the associative entity called training record is necessary to link students to activities/services, as shown in the following sample ERD.

2. Design tables in 3NF. As you create the database, include various codes for at least three of the fields. 



3. Use sample data to populate the fields for at least three records in each table. 

4. Recommend a date format for the new system. Should Personal Trainer adopt a single international standard, or should the format be determined by the country in which the center is located? Write a message to Susan with your recommendation.

Personal Trainer faces an issue that has become important as many companies enter the international marketplace. Should a small multinational company attempt to maintain a standard date format, or is it better to adapt to the formats used in the countries where it operates? Although the Personal Trainer situation involves dates, it could involve currency formats, numeric representations, weights and measures, or any other conventions that differ from one country to another. There is no standard answer to this question. Personal Trainer must use the local format in all external relationships in order to avoid confusion and operational problems in Canada and to maintain customer satisfaction. But what about internal communications? Many users might feel that the best approach is a program or macro that automatically translates dates into the format best understood by the recipient. For example, in a communication from Personal Trainer headquarters in Chicago to the Toronto super center about the Canada Day holiday on July 1, 2009, the date would appear in Canadian format as 1.7.2009 — even though the Chicago user entered it as 7/1/2009. Others might feel that Personal Trainer should adopt a consistent standard for all internal communications. If so, perhaps the ISO 9000 format would be acceptable.




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