Australian Native Plants Ltd (ANP) is a national plant nursery cooperative specialising in native… 1 answer below »

Case Study: Australian Native Plants Ltd – Online CRM Database
Background
Australian Native Plants Ltd (ANP) is a national plant nursery cooperative specialising in
native Australian plants. From its beginnings four years ago in Greenock South Australia, the
ANP cooperative now includes six independent plant nurseries around Australia, all
specialising in different types of Australian native plants local to their area.
Anna Zikov, the owner of Greenock Australian Native Nursery and founder of ANP, started
the cooperative to provide a common national web platform to promote, provide advice and
sell Australian native plants. A horticulturalist by profession, Anna enjoys using and
experimenting with technology in her nursery and uses sensors and electronic device
controllers to automate some of the environment control in her green houses.
Anna enlisted the services of local web developer Josh to build a platform for ANP. Josh had
done a great job on the Greenock nursery website and Anna is very pleased with the new
ANP website. It is easy to navigate and provides a lot of local information to which other
members of the ANP cooperative contribute. She was very surprised that her ANP
cooperative idea proved popular with other native plant nurseries and clients. However as
more nurseries joined the cooperative, clients and nursery owners started to notice data
anomalies such as wrong or out-of-place information, slow retrieval of information, plant
order information not reaching the ANP coop member, and random difficulties entering new
information.
Anna had a chat with Josh who admitted that, although he is a good web developer, his
database design skills were not quite as good. Anna and Josh called on you as a database
design consultant to make some recommendations. After some consultation and looking at
the database, you realise that Josh had created a flat file database and entity relationships
were not logically defined. Your recommendation is to create a Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) style database to which nursery industry specific adaptations could be
added later. As an experienced database designer, you know that you will not be able to
deliver all the database functionality Anna is hoping for in the first project. You explain the
need to define a core database system which will provide a foundation for added functionality
in the future