CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.0 Introduction
In a bid to meet the challenges of teeming population in countries all over the world, government and private investors have come into the educational sector to establish institutions of higher learning. An integral part of the facilities made available in such institutions are hostel accommodation spaces for students to create an academic community which will help facilitate effective refinement and development of the students. However, most of these hostel facilities especially in institutions in developing countries are managed with conventional manual methods and this has been impacting negatively on the effective resource utilization and overall efficiency of these academic institutions. The manual method of managing and administering hostels in institutions is obviously not effective as it is attributed to the following challenges:
The proposed system provides solution to the problems of traditional method of managing hostel facilities. The system attempts to improve institutions’ hostel services for stakeholders � administrator, management and students of the hostel. It automates the administrative processes and reduces the stress associated with searching for information on a student/a facility in a bundle of registers. It is specially designed to centrally allocate and manage accommodation spaces in a typical student’s hostel. The system user can store the data of those students who had left the hostel, and check the personal profile (retrieves from the database) of all the current students within few minutes. The students in the hostel will be recognized from the ID number allocated at the point of room allocation. This system automatically calculates all the bills and issues notifications.
The system has a unique approach to tracking information and report generation which is vital in data handling. This makes the proposed system more robust, more reliable and efficient. Entire gamut of the system comprises of several modules for room allocation, inventory management, time-tabling, transportation scheduling and other administrative activities. It can be well defined to track performance within the application of hostel accommodation system. The system uses one single central database to handle the complexity of student’s hostels management and all administrative functions.
The hostel facility management software is user-friendly application package specifically designed to automate, coordinate and look after all the processes of managing hostel facility. It is useful especially in large educational institutions with college hostels, school hostels, and organizations like military, large corporations and establishments with working employees’ hostels. All the functions that hostel management entails can easily be managed by hostel management software
1.1 Theoretical Background
There has been an astronomical increase in the number of educational institutions established especially in the last four decades all over the world. This development has brought education to the doorstep of people. Consequently it has increased knowledge and helped produce a population of enlightened citizens who can easily abide by the rules of civilized society and contribute meaningfully to the process of democratic governance. Most of the newly established educational institutions however, are using the old conventional techniques for managing their assets especially hostel facilities. This old techniques with its inherent limitations have impacted negatively on the overall organizational efficiency of this educational systems. In this paper, the development of an automated hostel accommodation management system is proposed.
Accommodation problem of the students has become the major aspect that the management board of the university should consider. The job for the college management has become more complicated. During the hostel registration in previous semesters, the situations were messy, unsystematically. Therefore, the college management board should try to avoid this type of situation. In handling these problems, a more reliable, systematic and easy-to-use computer system for the hostel allocation should be implemented. In addition, to make our society a caring society, the welfare of each student should be high-lighted, especially for students who are having a physical disfigurement in hostel allocation. To manage the hostel more systematically, a more reliable system is needed. The system of hostel allocations that is being used now is still done manually and partly computerized while the numbers of students who accommodate in the hostel keep increasing annually. To tackle the problem, the allocation of hostels should be fully computerized for the coming new intake
1.2 Statement of Problem
For the current, manual implementation hostel allocation system, the major problems faced by the college managements are defined as below:
1.3 Aim and Objectives of the Study
The aim of the study is to develop an automated resource management system for hostel allocation. The following are the objectives of the study:
1.4 Significance of the Study
The following represents the significance of the study:
1.5 Scope of the Study
This study is centered on Automated Resource Management System for Hostel Allocation using University of Uyo as a case study. It focuses on utilizing a database to manage hostel allocation information for students only.
1.6 Organization of the Research
This research work is organized into five chapters. Chapter one is concerned with the introduction of the research study and it presents the preliminaries, theoretical background, statement of the problem, aim and objectives of the study, significance of the study, scope of the study, organization of the research and definition of terms.
Chapter two focuses on the literature review, the contributions of other scholars on the subject matter is discussed.
Chapter three is concerned with the system analysis and design. It presents the research methodology used in the development of the system, it analyzes the present system to identify the problems and provides information on the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed system. The system design is also presented in this chapter.
Chapter four presents the system implementation and documentation, the choice of programming language, analysis of modules, choice of programming language and system requirements for implementation.
Chapter five focuses on the summary, constraints of the study, conclusion and recommendations are provided in this chapter based on the study carried out.
1.7 Definition of Terms
Hostel: An inexpensive place for accommodation usually found in boarding schools.
Allocate: To set aside something specifically for a person or something.
Accommodate: To provide someone with a place to say
Students: Someone who studies at a school, college or university.
Management: The planning, organizing and controlling of the affairs of an organization, institution or business