Effective Workflow Management System For Kanthini Beauty Salon

Abstract

Today beauty culture has become one of the basic needs of almost every person in the society in spite of their gender and age. Thus the beauty salon has become an almost iconic figure in modern generation. The client organization Kanthini Beauty Salon is one such iconic figures in beauty culture field, having more than 500 regular clients and about 750 monthly walk-ins. Though there is a significant client base for the company, there is a huge competition in this business; since the number of new entrants to the business is remarkably increasing. Not only that, but also the manual file keeping process was also identified to be more problematic, hence it had led to issues like data redundancy, data inconsistency and conflicts in proper decision making. Thus to reduce such problems, Kanthini Beauty Salon was looking for advanced technological aspects to gain major competitive advantages. Thereby the concept of Effective Workflow Management System was welcomed by the client; hence it is a web based system that comprised with a public website. The intended system would enable the clients to view information about the salon, while providing the opportunity to book appointments online. It would also help to make the overall management more effective as the system consists of features like maintaining a proper database, employee management, leave handling, stock management and timely reports generation. The system was developed in accordance with the Rational Unified Process (RUP) which is an object oriented and an iterative model for system development. Design and analysis was done using Unified Modeling language (UML). PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) was used as the server side scripting language. At the meantime, Apache was used as the web server and MySQL as the database management system. The system was tested time to time during the whole development period. A proper test plan and suitable test cases were designed and used for this purpose and finally a user acceptance testing was carried out in order to get the user feedback. The web based Salon Management System has been developed to assist the management of Kanthini Beauty Salon to manage the business process more efficiently and effectively and thereby empowering them to gain competitive advantage.