Question

Exotic Cars Inc. (ECI) is a company specializing in sales and maintenance of the exotic

(hence the name) cars.
The cars that ECI sells come from multiple sources: some are shipped directly from the
factories, other purchased from the private collectors, and yet some other cars are traded-
in by the customers of ECI.
ECI also provides a regular maintenance service of the exotic cars, such as engine tune-
up, tire rotation, oil change, etc. You do not have to buy a car from ECI to use its
maintenance service; consequently, some owners of the exotic cars purchased elsewhere
also use ECI maintenance service.
ECI appreciates continuing business of its patrons; consequently, the company wants to
maintain as much information about each valuable customer as it possibly can.
As a result, ECI diligently records how much money each customer spends on buying
cars (more than a half have purchased two cars and about third bought three or more), on
maintenance service (how much customer spends overall, and per car), and whether or
not a customer ever traded a car in.
Course Project Description
Your goal is to develop one of the modules of a database that shall allow ECI to keep
track of its business and provide the management with the following information
regarding the performance of the business:

Inventory Management
Complete information on the number and types of the cars currently kept in stock
Complete information on the number and types of the cars obtained from each source
(factory, private collector, trade-in, etc.)
Complete information on the maintenance of the car that ECI performed while owning
the car.

Create an Entity Relationship Diagram for the Inventory Management

Answer 1

To create an Entity Relationship Diagram for Inventory Management at Exotic Cars Inc., key entities such as Cars, Sources, Customers, and Maintenance Services are identified, along with their attributes and relationships, enabling management to access complete information on inventory, car origins, and maintenance records.

Step-by-step explanation:

To develop an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) for the Inventory Management module of Exotic Cars Inc., we first need to identify the key entities and their relationships. The entities likely include Cars, Sources (factories, private collectors, trade-ins), Customers, and Maintenance Services.

The Cars entity would have attributes such as CarID, Type, and StockStatus. The Sources entity would record where each car comes from, with attributes like SourceID, SourceType. Customers will have CustomerID, Name, PurchaseHistory, MaintenanceHistory, and whether they've TradedIn a car. The Maintenance Services entity will detail the services ECI performed, with attributes such as ServiceID, CarID, ServiceDate, ServiceType, and Cost.

Relationships between these entities will be based on their interactions, for example, Cars are linked to Sources, showing where each car originated from, and Cars are also linked to Maintenance Services, detailing the maintenance each car has received. Customers are linked to both Cars, for purchases and trade-ins, and Maintenance Services for tracking service expenditures.

In the ERD, we'll represent these entities as rectangles, with relationships depicted as lines connecting them. Attributes will be listed within the entity rectangles, and keys (like CustomerID or CarID) will be underlined to indicate they are unique identifiers. Using this system, management can quickly access complete information about the inventory, the origin of cars, and the maintenance records for each vehicle.