2 Passing Lane Passing Lane is a small trucking company headquartered in Portlan

Question

2 Passing Lane Passing Lane is a small trucking company headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Passing Lane's information system consists of a file server and three workstations where freight clerks enter data, track shipments, and prepare freight bills. To perform their work, the clerks obtain data from the server and use database and spreadsheet programs stored on stand-alone PCs to process the data. At your meeting yesterday, Passing lane's president approved your recommendation to create a relational database to handle operations and provide links for the company's shippers and customers.

Tasks

1. Review the concept of supply chain management. Although Passing Lane offers services rather than products, could the SCM concept apply to the design of the new system? Why or why not?

2. What would be the advantages of selecting an Web-based architecture for Passing Lane's system?

3. Since the firm is growing rapidly, what design features should be included in the new system to ensure it can grow with the company.

4. Given that Passing Lane currently uses computers for managing their operations, what design considerations should be given to legacy systems? Explain your answer.

Explanation / Answer

2) Moving from a 2 tier architecture to 3 tier has great benefits; when a 3 tier

architecture is build using the lastest technologies - the benefits would be a lot

great.

In a web based architechtur, the employees or customers or interested parties can

have access to live data anywhere and any time without lag and irrespective or

load and availability of IT support staff.

If we choose web based architecture we can go for cloud, VPNs, online VMs if

required where by the cost of managing Information as an asset would be reduced,

redundancies in work, duplicacy of data, reporting overheads etc would all be lost

in one single move.

No.of professionals required to control data at each center would be reduced, and

more specialised people and process centric procedures could be developed for

effective management.

When using web centric approach, multi platform would be acheived - from business

persective in simple terms any architecture could start using data from main

server ( like sending data in JSON), the market/data openness increases.

3) Since the firm is on a growing tread - looking into latest technolgies that

could stand ground for test of time - like data over JSON, cloud servers (so that

systems could be upgraded/downgraded based on business flow), high security (ssl

and VPN), choosing opensource or paid versions of software is critical (like in

.net or java). Choosing correct DB, if more read speed in read and write is required going for MANGO (structure less) database; if more security and integrity is a concern then choosing between mysql and ms sql etc. Alls these feature should be weighted.

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