Spiffy organization and system profile
Spiffy Corporation is a fictional national product distributor that sells and services automobiles, among other products, to retail customers through a network of regional offices and local dealerships.
Given the high competitiveness of today's automobile industry, the success of an operation like the Spiffy Corporation depends on high-quality servicing and timely delivery of spare parts to the customer. To meet this competition, Spiffy has established a vast service network incorporated within its dealership organization.
The dealership organization is headed by a central vehicle distributor located in Chicago, Illinois. There are several regional distribution centers across North America. Two of these are located in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Kansas City, Missouri. These centers minimize the distribution costs of vehicles and spare parts by setting up regional inventories. The Minneapolis regional center serves approximately 15 dealerships while the Kansas City center serves as many as 30 dealerships.
The figure here illustrates a system organization chart for Spiffy Corporation. Figure 1. The Spiffy Corporation system organization
Spiffy is in the process of building up a nationwide integrated telecommunications network. For the automobile division, they are setting up a network of System i™ products for the regional distribution centers and the dealerships. These are connected to a S/390® system at the central vehicle distributor. This network is considered a vital business asset for maintaining the competitive edge.
The central distributor runs DB2 Universal Database™ for z/OS® on its S/390 system with relevant decision support software. This system is used because of the large amounts of data that must be handled at any one time in a variety of application programs. The central vehicle distributor system is not dedicated to automobile division data processing. It must handle work and processes for the corporation that do not yet operate in a distributed database environment. The regional centers are running System i products. They use APPC/APPN with SNADS and 5250 Display Station Pass-through using an SDLC protocol.
All of the dealerships use System i products that vary in size. These systems are connected to the regional office using SDLC protocol. The largest dealerships have a part time programmer and a system operator to tend to the data processing functioning of the enterprise. Most of the installations do not employ anyone with programming expertise, and some of the smaller locations do not employ anyone with more than a general knowledge of computers.