Using Technology to Build a Business

Times-R-Us (TRU) is a maturement brick and mortar retailer with over 200 American stores. Specializing in seasonal items, they persuade their stores from January to mid-February with Valentines gifts; from March to May with easterly and Mothers sidereal day gifts, from June into the summer with Fathers Day gifts and stickeryard waste items; in August with back to school items; in October with Halloween costumes; and from November to declination with Christmas gifts. By turning over inventory, its small retail stores are always in picky season-with very brief usher out gross sales following sepa sayly season. TRU currently does non fuddle a significant on tenor sales presence, although it uses the sack up for customer support. TRUs embodied offices are in Hoffman Estates, IL. It has nine regional offices and dissemination centers in: Syracuse NY, Greensboro NC, Pensacola FL, orchard City, OH, Bennett, CO, Denton, TX, Portland OR, San Luis Obispo CA, and Hoffman Estat es. The company grossed $475 million in sales last twelvemonth and netted a $40 million dollar profit. It is growing at a rate of about five portion a year and gap about 10 raw stores each year. Payne Indaneck, the CIO, works from the corporate office. Each regional IT staff is run by a Technical Director. So there are eight IT centers with the Hoffman Estates operation doing corporate support as well as regional operations. Anita Lotta-Help is the Technical Director in Hoffman Estates. You work for Anita.\nThe IT centers are connected by using AT&T as the aid provider (currently leased line T1 from Corporate into the Regionals and SDSL from Regionals into the stores. HQ overly has an Internet connection and a separate connection for their web server ( withal with AT&T, twain T1 speeds). AT&T also provides the voice links. The Regionals and stores do not have Internet connectivity extract through HQ. TRU also uses RackSpace for offline archival storage. Each of the 200 st ores is able to tie into the RackSpace service (t...