Car Dealer and Car Maker Compliance
Database Querying

The Business Situation

When trading partners devise new ways of working with each other, they may not know what to expect. For example, when a car maker creates a web site for potential customers to inquire about new vehicles and refers these inquiries to dealers, the car maker will be concerned about the timeliness of the dealers' responses. The dealers, on the other hand, want their fair share of the referrals. The car maker and the dealers can promise to abide by an agreement on response time and the way referrals are allocated, but neither the car maker nor their dealers seem ready to trust the other one completely given the history of their relationships and the potential for technology to prompt changes in the way cars are sold.

One approach to helping a car maker and its dealers work together to promote sales of vehicles is for each party to have assurance that the other one is abiding by the agreement. This kind of two-sided assurance could be achieved through the use of database queries that could be run continuously to identify non-compliant responses soon enough for corrective action to be effective. Your assignment, explained below, is to give the car maker assurance about dealer compliance and to give dealers assurance about car maker compliance.

The Database

To make it easier for people to buy its cars, a car maker established a Web site that lets potential buyers indicate which model(s) and features interest them. After receiving the information from a potential buyer, the car maker records it in database tables like the following:

Customer table (primary key = CustomerID)