Developing a Day Care Center for An-Najah National University

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The project described in this report is concerned with the planning and designing a high quality day care center at An-Najah National University in Nablus, Palestine. It investigates the importance of including market study and facility planning within the development process to provide high quality and standardized daycare for the children of An-Najah University staff and other graduate students.  

In today’s social life, parents want to do their very best to make sure that their newborn is nurtured as they go through the various stages of development. The first five years of a children life will lay the most important foundations for the remainder of his or her life. This project presents a proposal for developing a new daycare in Nablus city, Palestine. A quality daycare business can help children feel comfortable while being away from their parents. The main goal of this project is to use different engineering tools in developing a new high quality daycare in order to improve the child social, emotional, physical, and language development with minimum costs. Parents tend to put their children in safe and high quality daycares to make sure their kids receive the necessary skills needed for their development. They need practical, everyday knowledge on how to care for their children and how to meet their needs. The target of this project is the employees and the graduate students at An-Najah University in Nablus.

The project methodology defines the sequence of activities to be carried out in order to achieve the project goals. The project initiated by developing a comprehensive survey in order to collect the necessary data to conduct the feasibility study for this research. Simultaneously, the information required to support the proposed project were collected from many different daycares already existed in Nablus and Ramallah cities to identify opportunities for improvement.

Then a new daycare layout design that considers international standards will be developed. Finally, the proposed daycare project will be delivered to the senior management at An-Najah University and validated by applying different sensitivity and risk analysis and cost control techniques.

This project addresses many topics, such as, Introduction which include many subtopics for example: Project's significance, Project's Aim, project's objectives, Project's questions, Project's methodology, Project's Outputs, Project's Outline.

Also there is the Background chapter which includes: Background, Genesis and evolution of day care centers in Nablus, National standards, Definitions and General Provisions, License, Services, Qualifications and tasks of the Nanny.

And "Identify problems and Market Research" chapter. Also , Facility Planning chapter that include: Physical Environment, Facility Planning, Facility Location, Facility Layout, Daycare Departments, Layout procedure. By the end of first semester 2013-2014, we were  presented the following chapters:

"FINENCIAL FEASIBILITY STUDY' chapter that include the following subtopics : Expected Demand, Requirements, Start-up costs, Running costs, fees and revenues, sensitivity analysis,  Income Analysis which consists of : Pay-Back Period, Benefits\Costs Analysis, Average rate of return.

Moreover, we have the “STRATEGIC PLANNING “and “CONCLUSION & EVIDENT DECLERATION" chapters.

In this Project, we were able to develop a day care center for ANU from scratch, taking into consideration the market needs, the facility layout, the feasibility study and other topics. We can now say that our project is 100% feasible and ready for verification.

      Though, we had some constraints and fears, we also had limitations and standards to follow. But we were able to deal with this stuff based on the knowledge we took from Industrial Engineering courses through our 5 years journey in this department.

      And in the last chapter which is "conclusion & Evident Deceleration” we were talking about these constraints, design standards and about earlier course work used in this project.

Some of the main constraints of our project were:

·         Results : Based on our market study and Questionnaires, the price for a monthly day care center must be less than or equal 150$.

·         Time Frame : Based on the questionnaires, more than the third of our potential customers have kids within the age group (0-1), in order to benefit from these customers the day care center must be ready within the next two years maximum.

·         Resources : in this project, the ultimate constraint in the land we planned to have the center on. During our researches we found out that the administration of the university planned not to invest this land due to environmental issues –the ratio of planted lands to built lands is too small- and that leave us the efforts of convincing them of our project, its financial and social benefits.

·         Target market : our market is targeting the workers and graduate students at ANU only, and this leave us with a very narrow customers’ base.

      We have already talked about our design standards in the background chapter. Our standards are listed in the Council of Ministers Resolution No. (11) Year 2011 for day care centers organizing Regulation discussed in details in pages (11-26).

And here we were mentioned the  Earlier course work used in our graduation project:

·         Facility planning course: principles in developing the location and layout;

·         Engineering economy course : to do the feasibility study;

·         Production planning course : to forecast the Demand;

·         Project management course : to plan the activities in the project;

·         Human resources course : to build the organization structure for the daycare ;

·         Engineering Drawing course : in designing the layout.