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Design Scenario for Harriet’s Fruit and Chocolate Company

Harriet’s Fruit and Chocolate Company was established in 1935 in the Pacific Northwest of the United States to ship gift baskets of locally grown peaches and pears to customers in the United States. The company also makes chocolates and baked goods to include in the gift baskets. It has grown extensively over the years and is currently one of the biggest companies in the Pacific Northwest.

Recently, Harriet’s descendants, who still run the company, have identified a need to immediately report when fruit is starting to ripen and should be picked and placed in cold storage. Employees in the marketing department have identified a need to access inventory data for the fruit in the orchards and in cold storage. With this data, they can design and sell gift-basket products that take advantage of the ripe fruit. This data must also be fed into e-commerce applications so that web orders can correctly specify product availability.

In addition, the company recently hired an ambitious programmer who is anxious to use her knowledge of SAS programming, SQL, and DB2 to design reporting applications for senior management. She calls you every day with new ideas on what she could accomplish if the network were upgraded so that she could reach up-to-date data from the orchards and cold storage buildings.

As the network designer for this company, you have been charged with selecting network technologies to reach the orchards and cold storage buildings. Each of the six orchards has a shack with one or two standalone PCs and a printer. The three cold storage buildings are huge warehouses that include a few standalone PCs and printers. The local telephone company has suggested that you lease fractional T1 links, but these links are expensive and possibly beyond your budget. Wireless technologies are also possible, but you have heard that fruit trees, especially full-grown trees that are tall and leafy, can absorb a wireless radio frequency (RF) signal. You have also heard that the cold storage buildings have ice hazards, making it hard to install equipment. But you will not let these challenges faze you.

1. What investigation will you do with regard to the physical infrastructure of the orchards, the orchard shacks, and the cold storage buildings?

2. Make a list of business goals for Harriet’s Fruit and Chocolate Company. What are some constraints that will affect these goals?

3. Make a list of technical goals for Harriet’s Fruit and Chocolate Company. What tradeoffs might you need to make to meet these goals?

4. Will a wireless solution support the low delay that will be needed to meet the needs of the applications? Defend your answer.

5. What security concerns should you bring up as you design the network upgrade?

Assumptions

1. We got six sharks and each of the six orchards has a shack with one or two standalone PCs and a printer {This means that the printer is only connected to one machine or it is shared i.e when one needs to print they connect to the printer through a printer cable.

2. There are three cold storage buildings that are huge and it got a few standalones and printers {we assume the above explanation}

3. We also assume that for it to be a big company , this means its might be having very large land and all its operations are on the same land it got its Orchards. The means of transport from orchards to the warehouse as well as from warehouse to packaging building we are using pickups

4. I have also made an assumption that the three warehouses would each store different goods, i.e warehouse one to store peaches, the other pears and the third one to store products from the confectionery (Chocolates and backed products)

What investigation will you do with regard to the physical infrastructure of the orchards, the orchard shacks, and the cold storage buildings?

When it comes to the physical infrastructure what I will investigate in the existing network, is the communication between the orchards, the orchards shacks and the cold storage. Considering the sharks as well as the cold storage buildings have standalone PC’s , this means that the probable means of records would be hardcopies which will have to be stored in a designated office. As a network designer, I would implement a network that will, if not fully, eradicate paperwork thus having a database which any of the authorized users can view as well as edit according to what rights they have been given by the systems admin.

As a network designer, I would want to know how the fruits reach the warehouse and how they are received. For this scenario, many ways can arise e.g the communication between the warehouse and supervisor at the orchards can be either a simple Telephone call telling them that they should be expecting fruits from the orchards or Orchards supervisors can have smart phones which they can fill the details of the dispatch and send it to warehouse manager via internet.

Assuming the supervisor will just do a simple telephone call (assuming we working on affordability), the fruits will reach the bay of the warehouse where they are loaded to a conveyor belt where they are cleaned as the quality expert team sorts out what to be stored in warehouse i.e pick the good fruits. Once they pass through the check, they are packed into a box which has a barcode thus its scanned before storing it in the warehouse. Here I have introduced a barcode scanner which will always update a database. Since we have access to the backend of the company’s website , once the goods are verified and scanned, the upload is done real time to the website thus the clients can be able to order the fruits as well as products from confectionery if they don’t want them as gift basket products.

For gift basket products, there should be a packaging department. The work of the packaging department is to do gift basket products which have been ordered by the customers through e-commerce.

How do they know there are orders? The sales and marketing department always keeps track of the orders done online and thus sends them to the packaging department as well as the warehouse so as they can be dispatched.

The infrastructure that will be needed here is a very simple LAN which will enable communication in the organization as well as sharing of resources. The connection to the outside/public will be through the internet. The connection to public domain can be through a router from an ISP or through a modem.

LAN Setup - Theoretically

Making an asssuption that the sharks are only 100meters apart and situated out of the orchards, I would suggest that since we will purely be having telephone communications from the Orchards to the warehouse, we can move the stand alone computers to the warehouse and network them. For each warehouse assuming they are like 300meters apart, we can have them connect to the packaging department as well as the main office- housing the marketing and sales department as well as accounts and other managers – through microwave links thus they are mounted at the rooftop and directed to a line of site to the packaging building and main building.

For each and every building you will run UTP Cables as they are easier and cheaper to implement. Reasons why I would not suggest we use fiber is that we will have to tamper with the tamacked road in the land.

The connection to the public domain will be through a router which is owned by an Internet Service Provider(ISP) Company.

The Need to Support Mobile Users is also a very vital business goal to look at. The network designer should advise on what devices can be used e.g notebooks which got wireless networking built in to facilitate users getting work done outside the office. So in this sense the network designer should incorporate the biggest trends in network design which is virtual private networking (VPN), where private networks make use of the Internet to reach remote locations or possibly other organizations.

Make a list of business goals for Harriet’s Fruit and Chocolate Company. What are some constraints that will affect these goals?

Business goals for Harrit Fruits and Chocolate Company Includes:

i. Increased Revenue and Profits

ii. Expand on new markets – that’s why the e-commerce application

iii. Increase market share

iv. Remain competitive

v. Offer the best customer support

vi. Need to Support Mobile Users

Goals on applications

i. File sharing, access and transfer

ii. Communication through email or chats

iii. Database access and updating

iv. Security –e.g surveillance and security camera videos

Some constraints that may affect these goals include:

i. Budget and staffing:

• Budget

As a network designer, I know the importance of redundancy as it will always keep their e-commerce application always available but the resources might be limited thus expected to work with the company’s budget.

• Staffing:

When we establish a network, they will have to recruit an IT support team which should maintain the smooth running of the network. These are additional costs of hiring , training as well as adding more people in the payroll.

ii. Some cases of unmotivated employees

Introduction of surveillance cameras/video. This can arise because of the introduction of surveillance cameras which might make the employees feel like they are constantly being monitored thus affecting at time production

iii. Policies

Does your network design need to fit into an overall architecture based on strategic planning? If it doesn’t –as good and perfect as it is- it will be rejected. So what can happen here is either you work using their policies or senior management agree to what is being offered and make flexible their policies which now means change of organizational strategic plan.

Make a list of technical goals for Harriet’s Fruit and Chocolate Company. What tradeoffs might you need to make to meet these goals?

a. Scalability

b. Availability

c. Affordability

d. Network Performance

e. Security

Tradeoffs that I might need to make in this case will be between availability, affordability and security.

For an e-commerce to be readily available, it needs to be in a powerful web server where millions and millions can access it at same time without fail. For this to happen we need to purchase a powerful server or we entrust it to a third party –like cloud computing, just as amazon does. This will definitely raise the costs (affordability) as also the third party will charge you.

Another tradeoff is between security and affordability: For a high security infrastructure, a lot of money has to be available.

Will a wireless solution support the low delay that will be needed to meet the needs of the applications? Defend your answer.

I would prefer a wired solution like fiber where am sure of large bandwidths as well as undistorted signals over a long distance.

Wireless solution which maybe might be viable is the satellite. This will be a heavy cost to both implement and maintain.

What security concerns should you bring up as you design the network upgrade?

• The Organization should be aware that the security implementations will definitely increase on their budget thus a tradeoff done between security and affordability

• The company should not have strict security that will affect the productivity of users.

• Strict security can also affect redundancy of a network design as all the traffic flowing in and out of organization has to be taken through encryption devices.

• The Organization should ensure that whatever security they are to implement should not exceed the cost for recovering from security incidents.

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