Question

System Architecture

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. What would be the advantages of selecting an Internet-based architecture for Passing Lane’s system?

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

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

Answer 1

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

A web-based architecture would increase efficiency, offer better scalability, additional redundancy, and can be much more affordable. This route makes since given the companies business type. When the customer would order a product from the then the manufacture may need to order additional supplies to fulfil that order and a web-based architecture would make the entire process more efficient.

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

Various analytic tools and reports would be beneficial to know what might need to be changed with the system or if growth if necessary. With these features they would be able to understand demand forecasts to anticipate customer demand. SCM systems can have many additional tools to handle processing, inventory, freight handling and transportation logistics.

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

Based on the information provided the system in this scenario is a small or mid-sized system in which there is only one server and a few workstations in which the employees are entering the order information. Depending on how much data there are then the legacy server should stay online for the short amount of time it would take to migrate the current data to the newest system. At that point, the system can be retired and the new system that is more efficient and has better scalability can be used.