Huffman Trucking Paper

Huffman Trucking Paper

Gaybrielle Towner

POS/355

Huffman Trucking

Huffman Trucking, a major national freight carrier has encountered tremendous growth over the past few years. The company now has over 1300 employees, 800 road tractors and 2100 trailers. The company has a diverse customer base and shipping ability. Management has realized that the company's automated information systems infrastructure is lagging. To solve this problem management has decided to implement an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Customer sales, orders, tracking, delivery, Maintenance, scheduling and accounting will all be integrated by the ERP.

Critical Systems

Huffman Trucking's information system contains all critical systems for normal daily operations. These primary critical systems include all shipping, receiving and tracking processes which are the main function of the company. The secondary critical systems include sales, vehicle maintenance, scheduling, contracts, payroll and accounting. The company's critical systems are responsible for daily operations and are currently vulnerable to downtime and inaccurate information due to a lagging information system infrastructure. Huffman Trucking uses different network protocols, to send and receive data, like IPX/SPX, and TCP/IP. Huffman Trucking employs star-ring topology, and token ring topology. The existing infrastructure of Huffman Trucking includes mix of networks. The organization implements local area network (LAN) and wide area network (WAN).

With a lagging automation information system, Huffman Trucking is vulnerable to several issues. Such issues include inaccurate information and data that can cause serious problems companywide such as inaccurate payroll or maintenance logs. Customer tracking can be inaccurate, slow or even become unavailable as the company grows out of its current information system. Maintenance, overhauling, accounting and ledgers can all be affected by a lagging automated information system as well.

Some of these problems may only affect the company performance and organization with little or no consequences, but other problems can have grave repercussions. For example; all truck drivers must keep an accurate drivers log. Such logs tell the company where there going, where they are, where they have been and for how long.