The Example Company, INTRAC

INTRAC is a public company in the transportation industry. INTRAC has three major product divisions. Division 1 provides short term courier services for small and medium sized packages, with delivery worldwide. Division 2 handles containers and other large commercial shipments, which are usually delivered within a one to three month time frame. Division 3 provides a variety of transportation-related services, such as freight forwarding, insurance, and so on.

Until a few years ago, all production applications were run on the company's mainframe computer at Headquarters (HQ). Five years ago, the Central Information Systems Division (ISD) began distributing selected applications to various PC networks at the divisions.

Major applications and financial databases continue to run on the mainframe computer, for several reasons:

• Complexity of the corporate applications
• Implications of tight financial control required of a public company
• Tighter security on the mainframe than on networks
• Client desire for discounts and accounting statements based on their total business with INTRAC

Clients view INTRAC as a single organization, through an integrated sales force that sells INTRAC's total services.

This simple concept has made information management at INTRAC more complex. Accordingly, INTRAC HQ must:

• Get transactions that are entered on divisional computers and are handled by many different people, and consolidate the information at HQ
• Thoroughly check the transactions
• Convince executive, management, and sales personnel that each has all the necessary and correct information on which to base reports and sales commissions

Each day the divisions transmit details of their daily sales results to HQ. On a daily basis, HQ updates their accounting system files. At scheduled times during the month, HQ generates daily, weekly and monthly reports. These reports are sent to dozens of locations.

At month-end, after processing all adjustments, consolidated client statements are issued, and sales commissions are calculated. A file containing the commission amount to be paid to each salesperson is sent from the sales operations department to the HQ payroll department. Additional reports are generated and sent to executives and management personnel, and to every salesperson.

Figure 41 illustrates INTRAC’s work flow.

Figure 41 INTRAC Work Flow