CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 1.1 BACKGROUND OF STUDY Virtually all software used in enterprises today has the same goal which is supporting business processes. Some processes are entirely automated, relying solely on communication among applications, others probably rely on people to initiate the process, approve documents the process uses and resolve any exceptional situations that arise like often possible to specify a discrete series of steps known as workflow that describe the activities of the people and software involved in the process. Once this workflow has been defined, an application can be built around that definition to support the business process. An office management is a set of activities organized hierarchically in a tree structure. An office management consists of a sequence of connected steps. It is a depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, a group of persons, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms. Office management may be seen as any abstraction of real work, segregated in work share, work split or other types of ordering. For control purposes, it may be a view on real work under a chosen aspect, thus serving as a virtual representation of actual work. The flow being described often refers to a document that is being transferred from one step to another. 1
flow charts An office management system is a model to represent real work for further assessment, e.g. for describing a reliably repeatable sequence of operations. More abstractly, an office management is a pattern of activity enabled by a systematic organization of resources, defined roles and mass, energy and information flow, into a work process that can be documented and learned. Offices are designed to achieve processing intents of some sort, such as physical transformation, service provision, or information processing. Office management concepts are closely related to other concepts used to describe organizational structure, such as silos, functions, teams, projects, policies and hierarchies. Office management may be viewed as one primitive building block of organizations. The term office management is used in computer programming to capture and develop human-to-machine interaction. An office management software aims to provide end users with an easier way to orchestrate or describe complex processingof data in a visual form, much like but without the need to understand computers or programming. An activity represents an action in an office. It can be a complete activity that consists of several child activities. An activity can be sequential which means that the order of its action is specified at design time or the activity can be event driven which means that the order of its action is determined at run time in response to external events. Windows office management foundation is a Microsoft technology for defining, executing and managing offices. Windows office management foundation includes a default set of activities that provide functionality for control flow, conditions, event handling, state management and communicating with applications and2
services. Windows office management foundation also provides an extensible model and designer to build custom activities that encapsulate office functionality for end users or for reuse across multiple properties. Windows office management foundation comes with a programming model, a rehostable and customizable office management engine and tools for quickly building office management application on windows. It can be used to enable workflow within line of business application, user interface page flows, document centric workflows, human workflows, composite workflow for service oriented applications, business rule-driven workflows and workflow for system management. It has the ability to moni execution in real time. Every office management system contains some number of activities, each of which performs some aspect of that workflows function. Office management acts as a container for these activities, providing a way to control their lifecycles and order of execution. Windows office management foundation aspires to support both system workflow and human office management in a unified fashion. System office management tend to execute activities in a well defined, predictable ways, while human office management do not. To address both of these requirements, windows office management foundation provides two built-in office management types: sequential office management capable of executing activities in a predefined pattern and state machine office management capable of responding to external events as they occur. Using office management system to automatetrationstudents’process is very necessary because of the flexibility and convenience it will offer both to the institution and students. This research work when implemented will make it possible for students to do their registration electronically on the institution’s website. The workflow management system will then keep track 3
registration process from one department of the institution to the other until the registration process is completed. It will also give the student feedback anytime the student log on to the school’s website t workflow will also create automatic d electronic form. 1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM The current student’s registrationcollageofhealthsciences pro which is based on manual registration process is characterized by lack of integrity, concurrency problem andprocessthetheir inabilityregistration online from any place. The current manual registration process exposes the system to lack of security of information thereby making the stude unauthorized users. Lack of a good database for student’s fire outbreak and flooding. With the current system, student’s who have photocopy the forms from others and do their registration. The current system does not support online registration which makes it mandatory for the student to do their registration within the school and this involves the transfer of this forms from hand to hand for approval and distribution for manual storage. Therefore the proposed system which is web-based will address the problems of insecurity, loss of document and delays in the student registration process. 1.3 OBJECTIVE OF STUDY 4
The purpose of this research work is to develop a system that should be able to achieve the following: 1. Automation of the student’s registrationpchangingallhard copy procedures involved to electronic media. 2. Provision of a robust database for the electronic storage of registered students’dataandat the same time reducing the number of stand alone databases. 3. Generation of students’registration number after the student have been duly cleared. 4. The use of office management to create a process that can help in routing, approval, tracking and scheduling of activities involved in the registration process. 5. Using office management system to notify students of their registration status anytime they log in on the site. 6. Providede password to prevent unauthorized users from accessing and manipulating information. 1.4.SIGNIFICANCE OF STUDY Using office management to automate an process will eliminate the problems associated with the registration process which includes but are not limited to lack of information integrity, concurrency problem and lack of data security. This project when implemented provides a common office management technology for windows which makes it possible and easier to implement a registration process that can rely on multiple windows applications. 5
It can also offer an office management framework for diverse applications that will allow the student’sprocesstobehostedregistratioinanyenvironmentandalso to be customized for any environment. Again, it can unify the system and human office management involved in the student’s registration process. This registration process which will provide the ability to modify a running office management. 1.5 SCOPE OF STUDY The scope of this research work is centered on the registration process of the students of Obasanjo collage of health science makurdi, Benue state. This project which is web-based, automates the student’s students registration number, monitors the movement of the electronic form online, notify students of their registration status anytime they l website and also maintains the integrity of the information being processed by using password to limit access to only approved individuals. The system also creates automatic database for the storage of successfully registered students 1.6 LIMITATIONS OF STUDY Due to time constraint and limited resources, the use of biometric could not be incorporated into the work for authentic identification of real students as well as incorporating text message alert facilities. 1.7 DEFINITION OF TERMS Activities are the fundamental building blocks of workflows. An activity represents an event in a workflow. An activity can be sequential which means that 6
the order of its action is specified at design time or event driven which means that the order of its execution is determined at run time in response to external events. Workflow: According to the Workflow Management Coalition glossary (1996) workflow is defined as the automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules. Office Management System: According toFischer and Layna (1999) it is a system that defines, creates and manages the execution of office management through the use of software, running on one or more workflow engines, which is able to interpret the process definition, interact with office management participants and, where required, invoke the use of IT tools and applications. Web-Based System: K.M. Hussain and D.S. Hussain (1997) opined that the term Web-Based system refers to those applications or services that are resident on a server thatcan be accessible using a Web browser and is therefore accessible from anywhere in the world via the Web. Internet: Behrouz and Chung (2004) in their book defined internet asa global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. They further opined that It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by a broad array of electronic and optical networking technologies. According to them, internet carries a vast array of information resources and services, most notably, the 7
inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support electronic mail. World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known as The Web, is a system of interlinked hypertext documents contained on the Internet as noted by Sanjay Sharma (2006). With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them by using hyperlinks. JAVA. Java is a fully computational object-oriented language. As such, it is a suitable vehicle for conventional standalone programs or applications, which is the main use of the language today. Java is also a multithreaded language and this feature makes it a highly scale able language for programs that execute on web server. Consequently, in recent years there have been increasing use of java for server SID, or servlet programming. With many programming languages, compilation produces machine code. Each platform will have its own machine specific code, so a program compiled on one platform will need to be recompiled on another before it can be ran. Java byte code is an intermediate code between source code and machine code. The byte code can be ran by any java interpreter that conforms to the java virtual machine (JVM) specification. A JVM can be standalone interpreter or embedded in a browser or electronic device. Java is case sensitive, using PUBLIC instead of public, for example will be rejected by the compiler. . 8
CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 INTRODUCTION According to Coalition Glossary (1996), office management an automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules. Office management is a term used to describe the tasks, procedural steps, organizations or people involved, required input and output information, and tools needed for each step in a business process. An office management approach to analyzing and managing a business process can be combined with an object-oriented programming approach, which tends to focus on documents and data. In general, office management focuses on processes rather than documents. Office management normally comprises of a number of logical steps, each of which is known as an activity. An activity can involve manual interaction with a user or an office participant, or the activity might be executed using machine resources. A number of companies make office management automation products that allow a company to create an office model and components such as online forms and then to use this product as a way to manage and enforce the consistent handling of work. For example, an insurance company could use an office management automation application to ensure that a claim was handled consistently from initial call to final settlement. The office management application would ensure that each person handling the claim used the correct online form and successfully completed 9
their step before allowing the process to proceed to the next person and procedural step. The goal of some office management systems is to, in a way, teach the computer system to “understand” the wo programmer constructs the process description, and then is absent when the activities are being performed. The value of the process description is directly related to how well the description matches the real process.(Embedded & Autonomous office management: A WfMC White Paper, available at www.wfmc.org) 2.2 OFFICE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM According to Fischer $ Layna (1999), office management system is a system that defines, creates and manages the execution of office activities through the use of software, running on one or more workflow engines, which is able to interpret the process definition, interact with office participants and, where required, invoke the use of IT tools and applications. It can also be seen as a system overseeing the process of passing information, documents, and tasks from one employee or machine to another within a business. Through proper office management, each of these employees or machines will pass the work on according to a predetermined procedure. As technology advances, many offices have become automated and takes advantage of special software to make the process much smoother. While Keith Swenson (1995) defined office Management Systems (OMS) as softwares used to structure the flow of work among individuals and units in an organization. According to him,wwhenever a process is repeated many times and involves multiple individuals or units, office systems can be useful in systematizing those processes and making them more efficient. For example, the process of receiving a customer request for publications, sending that request to the warehouse, 10
processingthe order in the warehouse, sending a shipment notice to a carrier, processing the order through accounting, etc., can be viewed as an office process. Similarly, the process of publishing a document is an office process: the author submits copy for editorial review, the copy editor makes suggested changes, the author incorporates changes and resubmits the document, the copy editor sends it to design, the designer lays out the document for publication, a proof copy of the document is sent to the author for final review and indexing, the author sends it back etc.The process definition consists of a network of activities and their relationships, criteria to indicate the start and termination of the process, and information about the individual activities, such as participants, associated IT applications and data etc. 2.3 OFFICE MANAGEMENT SCHEDULING According to (Navjot et al) in comparison of office management scheduling algorithms in cloud computing said that scheduling is a function module of the workflow engine, thus it is a significant part of office management system. Office management Scheduling: office management scheduling is a kind of global task scheduling as it focuses on mapping and managing the execution of interdependent tasks on shared resources that are not directly under its control. Office management includes five dimensions: time, cost, fidelity, reliability and security. This section presents a set of scheduling algorithms, based on Time management. The aim of the algorithms is to optimize the make span, which is defined as the maximum time taken for the completion of all the tasks in a given application. The proposed algorithms are implemented using a service based cloud and comparative results are shown. 11
The problem of scheduling a set of tasks to a set of processors can be divided into two categories: a. Job scheduling b. Job mapping and scheduling In the former category, independent jobs are to be scheduled among the processors of a distributed computing system to optimize overall system performance. In contrast, the mapping and scheduling problems requires the allocation of multiple interacting tasks of a single parallel program in order to minimize the completion time on the parallel computer system. (Elnikety et al 2004) in their wor
.