|
||||
| On the 27th October 2006 Cofton Ltd contracted Optimise Systems Ltd to specify and write a Land Appraisal System. | ||||
Company |
||||
Cofton’s main business is delivering serviced land to house builders and other developers. They specialise in the regeneration of brown field sites for new development, working with developers and local planning authorities to create a proposal for a site prior to acquisition, servicing and resale. |
||||
| The Land Appraisal process is central to evaluating the commercial viability of proposed development sites. The appraisal process essentially attempts to quantify the land prices, sales revenues and costs associated with a project to give a guide to the project potential. Given a desired margin, the system can also be worked in reverse to suggest a land value for use in negotiations with the vendor. | ||||
| Proposal | ||||
| Optimise propose development of Web database application for deployment on the Intranet. The interface would primarily be through HTML pages delivered to a web browser. | ||||
| A detailed application design will be provided at analysis phase, but the application proposed here would reproduce the full functionality of the existing spreadsheet template. The application would also be flexible enough to allow cost and revenue items to be broken down to the level of detail deemed appropriate by the proposal manager. This cost breakdown would retain the ability to enforce the use of standard cost headings that the current system and project summaries are based on. | ||||
| It is often useful to maintain several alternative appraisal schemes for the same site and the application will enable this. It will provide the ability to base creation of a new proposal on an existing one. | ||||
| A detailed change audit is not proposed at this stage, but the ability for users to log a comment about changes to the proposal data in a proposal history would be included. | ||||
| A project overview page will allow capture of the details associated with production of the monthly project status report. | ||||
| The proposed database is MySQL, although this could be modified to accommodate Cofton’s preferences. The proposal assumes availability of a machine capable of running the database engine and a web server. The proposal would use the Apache Tomcat JSP container as a web server, which could run standalone or be integrated into an existing IIS setup if this is currently used to host the local intranet site. Microsoft Windows, Linux or Unix operating systems are all suitable platforms for both the database and web server. | ||||
| It is envisaged that the application would be made available on a local network, available over a VPN link from remote sites. The provision of network connectivity is outside the scope of this proposal. Cofton have plans to enable VPN access to their remote users and it is assumed they will manage this internally. | ||||
| Reporting | ||||
| For most reporting requirements, the browser print options will be satisfactory. However to enable production of user-definable reports, or documents neatly formatted and paginated for print output, it may be necessary to use a third party reporting package. A tool such as Crystal Reports may be required. Alternatively Web or Database queries developed to import data into MS Excel may be sufficient. | ||||
| Optimise would support development of the required database queries, but Cofton may choose to retain ownership and control of these additional reporting capabilities and these are excluded from the current proposal. | ||||
| Optimise
Systems Ltd Working in partnership with Cofton Ltd |
||||
