DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A COMPUTER BASED STADIUM INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Abstract

Stadium management contributes to an effective combination of skills related to planning, organizing, and evaluating within the context of an organization or department whose primary product or service is related to stadium or physical activity. This field became more popular as a result of the massive population increase in the lovers of sports in the world today. This project focuses on ticket and information management in Nnamdi Azikiwe stadium Enugu, Enugu state Nigeria in other to developed an online stadium management system that will be able to solve the problem faced by the current system. Questionnaire and structural interview are fact finding method used to obtain information’s from the stadium managers. The methodology adopted for this project was Object Oriented Hypermedia Design Method (OOHDM); this is due to its perfect ability in explaining the navigational view of the conceptual domain of a system. This project was implemented using jQuery & PHP (for the back-end design), HTML & CSS (for the front-end design), and MYSQL (for the database design). The final outcome of this project was an online stadium management and information system developed for Nnamdi Azikiwe Stadium Enugu, Enugu state Nigeria, that helps in solving the problem of overcrowding stadium gates in other to purchase match ticket, this it does by providing an easy and efficient way of purchasing of match tickets by spectators online from the comfort of their homes and offices, and also help the stadium managers in easy access and retrieval of ticket and match details and also in proper management of information’s circulating around the organization.

Background of Study

In today‘s world of entertainment, stadium is originally designed to host football matches. When the sports and entertainment venue is on, it has to be fully operational, when there are no events it must be shut down to the safest and most economical operating condition. One of the necessary requirements to promote the good performance of the above mentioned sector is the proper management of the event venue which is the stadium.

According to George R. (1945), Management is a distinct process consisting of planning, organizing actuating and controlling; utilizing in each both science and art, and followed in order to accomplish pre-determined objectives.

Stadium management involves any combination of skills related to planning, organizing, directing, controlling, budgeting, leading, and evaluating within the context of an organization or department whose primary product or service is related to stadium or physical activity (DeSensi, Kelley, Blanton and Beitel, 2003).

There are various sectors, facilities and activities that need to be properly manage in the stadium this facilities and activities include; car parking space, allocation of seats, purchasing of tickets, atmosphere of the stadium at an ongoing event, risk assessment, information flow, managing of facilities and so on.

The common practice as already studied involves the spectators coming to the event venue two (2) or three (3) hours before the event commences, to purchase a ticket for the event and when that is achieved the individual gets a parking space as directed by a security personnel if he/she came with a vehicle and walks up to the stand to take a seat of his or her choice.

The above practice flaws the benefits of a good stadium management system as it cannot be able to control overcrowding of onlookers, avoidance of damages on stadium facilities cause by spectators as the struggles for ticket purchasing, giving good account of spectators profile because of lack of information storage facilities and proper documentation for ticket sales.

Due to the flaws of the manual way of managing the stadium, this call for an improvement in the way stadia are being managed and this leads to a shift from manual processing to Computer based processing as supported in the words of Davies D.W. and Barba D.L.A.

Davies D.W (1979) stated that computers have replaced manual technology because of its ability to process large volume of data or even handle complex work (processing capability) at a very high speed. It gives out accurate result at each time except when it is fed with incorrect data, Garbage-in-garbage-out. Hence, the need for computerization is certified.

In Barba D.L.A (1979) in his contribution says that computerization does not only involve computer technology consisting to only hardware and software but also the communication link, that is it establishes the link for data communication devices to interact and share data as well as transferring data/information from one location to another. Besides, computers can be used for keeping records and these records are always available whenever they are needed and the need of carrying office file from one place to another is eliminated and in most cases some documents may get lost or be tampered with on the transmit.

This brings about Computer Based Stadium Information Management System. This system is a web based software application to be designed to manage the activities that occurs in the stadium in other to solve the flaws that was unable to be achieved by manual approach, the system will have a user friendly interface that will be design to accommodate every necessary features using HTML5 AND CSS3 which will make it easier for spectators to purchase their tickets online and avoid overcrowding the stadium gate, the system will also have a database that will be design with MySQL5.0 for storing spectators information and lastly the system will be design with a backend programming language called PHP5.0 which helps in the allocation of seats and car space.