Ensuring quality web based seaport billing system through an engineering process: A case study

This study formulated a framework for implementing a web based seaport billing system to assist seaport customers in preparing and processing their bills at the seaport with ease and to make their records save and easy to retrieve. The research employed qualitative research approaches. Requirements were elicited from billing and accounting department of the Apapa seaport, Nigeria using interview, observation and content analysis as secondary data. The model was specified in Unified Modelling Language, and the system was implemented using HTML 5, hypertext pre-processor (PHP), Cascading style sheet and JavaScript. The result of this is the seaport billing system where different bills pertaining to clearing of cargo at the seaport are raised, and customers records are retrieved and used for further processing. Also, the results provided a module where the administrator of the system will be able to view details of customers, generate a report based on weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, thereby, assisting them to observe the trending pattern in terms of queue and time of bill processing as compared to the manual mode of bill processing. The result also showed a graph of weekly transaction report indicating which day of the week attracts business, and a two years quarterly billing report indicating the period the seaports actually experience the highest transaction for quality decision making. It is expected that the prototype system system implemented will help determine and evaluate a progression or retrogression in the billing activity in the seaport. Thus, the billing and accounting department of the seaport can send a well detailed and precise report of the billing activity of the seaport to higher authority.