Using Technology to Build a Business

Times-R-Us (TRU) is a ripening brick and mortar retailer with all over 200 American stores. Specializing in seasonal items, they communication channel their stores from January to mid-February with Valentines gifts; from March to May with easterly and Mothers daytime gifts, from June into the summer with Fathers Day gifts and endorseyard blank 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 argon always in fill season-with very brief discount run gross revenue following distributively season. TRU currently does not accommodate a significant on fund sales presence, although it uses the sack for customer support. TRUs corporeal offices are in Hoffman Estates, IL. It has nine regional offices and statistical distribution centers in: Syracuse NY, Greensboro NC, Pensacola FL, orchard City, OH, Bennett, CO, Denton, TX, Portland OR, San Lu is Obispo CA, and Hoffman Estates. 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 opening night about 10 innovative stores each year. Payne Indaneck, the CIO, works from the corporate office. Each regional IT ply is run by a Technical Director. So in that respect are eight IT centers with the Hoffman Estates cognitive 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 machine-accessible by using AT&T as the help provider (currently leased line T1 from Corporate into the Regionals and SDSL from Regionals into the stores. HQ too has an Internet connection and a separate connection for their web server ( in like manner with AT&T, both T1 speeds). AT&T also provides the voice links. The Regionals and stores do not have Internet connectivity only through HQ. TRU also uses RackSpace for offline archival storage. Each of the 200 stores is sufficient to tie into the RackSpace service (t...