Description

Winter Gear Distributors, WGD for short, is one of Fast-Fit’s main suppliers. They are a distributor of winter sports equipment and apparel, including every thing from the latest cross country skies to winter clothing that you could wear to the North Pole if needed. WGD has over 400 customers, deals with about 45 different manufacturers and takes on average 100 orders a day. While their products are state of the art, their information systems are out of date. In this case we will explore the problems with the current systems and upgrade their old legacy systems into an integrated enterprise wide system that will improve growth and profitability which are their main business concerns.

WGD has been in business for 30 years and like many similar businesses it has three departments namely sales, operations and accounting. The sales department deals with their customers, including Fast-Fit. They take orders over the phone and fill out a paper order form. They later confirm to the customer that the order is accepted and give a delivery date. They also answer any questions from the customer. The operations department commits to delivery dates for orders through Sales, fills and ships customer orders. Finally the accounting department gives credit approval or not for an order, issues invoices after orders have shipped and receives payments from customers for goods shipped.

While the sales and accounting departments are on two different floors of an office building downtown the operations department is located about three miles away near the Interstate. The information systems in place work only within each department. The three departments communicate with each mostly by inter office mail. None of the 3 systems currently communicate electronically with each other since they were bought by each department to serve their own needs. (Note that when you draw