Passing Lane is a small trucking company headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Pass
ID: 3774484 • Letter: P
Question
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 the 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
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 a 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
Sol
1.
“A supply chain consists of all stages involved, directly or indirectly, in fulfilling a customer request. The supply chain not only includes the manufacturer and suppliers, but also transporters, warehouses, retailers, and customers themselves.”—from Chopra and Meindl in their book Supply Chain Management: Strategy, Planning, and Operations.
In the given scenario, though Passing Lane is not directly involved with the manufacturing of products, but it do involves with the execution of the complete Order-to-Delivery cycle for the concerned manufacturing company. Passing Lane is actually the Transporter of goods. Now as per the definition of Supply Chain as defined above, they do qualified for the Supply Chain Management (SCM).
The implementation of SCM software can speed-up the execution of the entire order-to-delivery cycle and thus help the manufacturing companies to more productively generate and track sales orders. SCM also helps in dynamic scheduling of supplier deliveries to meet demands in more effective way, and more rapid creation of pricing and product configurations.
2.
Some of the advantages of using Web-based application is discussed below.
Easy Development and Troubleshooting
The web applications are run on browsers and hence it is sufficient to be developed for a single operating system. There is no necessity to develop and test the web application on different operating system each with its own configuration settings. This makes development and troubleshooting of web application much easier.
Anywhere, Anytime Accessibility
By implementing web-based architecture, Passing Lane users can access data from anywhere, anytime. This helps them to retrieve data about the sales or shipment information from anywhere in the world and at anytime. Similarly, with web-based application, clients of Passing Lane can track their shipment and receive updates on the same irrespective of geographical location and time.
Cross Device Accessibility
Users and clients can access Passing Lane’s web application from wide range of devices including PDA’s, Tablets, Mobile phones, etc. This further increases the user’s accessibility to Passing Lane’s web application.
Interoperability
Web applications can be run on varied platforms without any significant configurations. This helps the user to access the application from different machines with same look and feel.
Centralised Data Storage and Modification
Since in a web application data is accessed across the world, so all data are stored in a centralised location. Any changes in the data will be reflected in real-time to all users irrespective of geographical location.
Easier Installation and Upgrades
A web application needs to be installed only at one place called Host Server. All users can then access the application from the centralised location. Further, if application needs to be upgrade, the same can be done in Host Server only. The other users will automatically get access to the upgraded software.
Increased Security
Web applications are usually deployed on Dedicated Servers, which are far more secure than normal desktops. Also if any security policy needs to be implemented we have to do it at one location only rather than configuring on individual desktops.
3.
The following are the recommended design practices for Passing Lane: