Pressure Hydraulics is a locally owned business that currently has three service centres; Newcastle, Toronto and Maitland.

Pressure Hydraulics is a locally owned business that currently has three service centres; Newcastle, Toronto and Maitland. Each service centre provides maintenance and specialised servicing of hydraulic systems as used in cars, trucks and earth moving equipment. The Maitland service centre also provides a specialty service to the mining industry where two purpose built trucks go onsite to

service a range of mining equipment.

The business has become quite profitable in the past years and its owner, Allan Taylor, has devised

plans to expand by opening service centres at Coffs Harbour and Gosford. Allan has future plans for

other service centres along the east coast of NSW. He also feels that the time is right to look at how IT

can support the existing business and enable his future business plans.

Currently, Allan spends a portion of each day at each service centre to monitor its operations. This is

leaving little time to continue developing his business and he realises he will not be able to spend the

same sort of time in the Coffs Harbour and Gosford service centres.

Existing System

Each service centre operates as an independent business, with eight technicians in the workshop (one

of whom is a workshop foreman) and one office assistant. The office assistant takes phone calls from

people requesting quotes for work or to have work done. For requests on quotes, the office assistant

looks up a hard copy of a price book (known as The Price Book) and gives a verbal quote. Allan is

unhappy with the time being taken to update the Price Book as the office assistant is often too busy to

update the prices from the supplier invoices. Sometimes, this time delay results in either lost sales if

the price has gone down or lost income if the price has gone up.

If a customer phones to make a booking for work to be done, the office staff assistant writes down the