Nbi Bookware

BookWare

Business Background:

National Booksellers, Inc. (NBI) was established in 1990 as a wholesale organization, buying books and compact discs from publishers, and reselling it to different retail companies and exclusive distributors. The company’s headquarter is in California and the warehouse center is situated in New York. It has 136 customers.

The company’s key people are Bill Tyler, CEO, Marie Corbitt, vice president, Richard Gonzales, director of marketing, Carol Bailey, accounting manager, Michael Nakatani, manager of warehouse operations and John Lackritz, IS manager.

IS problems and motivations:

NBI has potential for unlimited growth opportunities; therefore, the company plans to expand in the near future. However, in order to expand the company’s information system should undergo major modifications and improvements in order to come up to the customer’s requirements. The major challenge that the firm is facing at moment is that the new information system should go online: this will broaden the horizons of the firm in terms of new potential customers. For instance, one large distributor company agreed to buy books provided that they go online within period four months.

The existing informational system has already become inadequate for the current number of users. NBI’s information system consists of dump terminals which are connected to a set of Motorola 6000-based microcomputers; vendors offer limited support. Operating Systems running on the computers do not get frequent updates. Software is totally dependent on the operating system. This severely restricts the company’s ability to upgrade the old hardware to a newer one, which is consequently reflected one the overall information systems’ performance. The current Operating System is not efficient because it is slow and unreliable. The system also needs adequate ad-hoc reporting features for IDS. In addition, the NBI organization should have rights to own and modify the program code.

Information System’s scope:

NBI buys books, magazines and compact disks from publishers and large distributors and resells them to its customers: bookstores, computer stores, and other types of retailers.

Functional Requirements:

1. Add/Modify