Database Recommendation - 2 Pages Due in 8hrsThe first and most important database-related decisions are whether to use a database at all and, if so, which database management system to use and why. T

Brewton Business Scenario

Brewton Enterprises, Inc. is a clothing retail company located in the city of Eugene, Oregon. The company offers an array of products with a mix of clothing styles, appealing primarily to teens and young adults. Brewton has four satellite offices: Los Angeles, New York, Houston, and Atlanta. These offices, including headquarters in Eugene, serve as distribution centers for products sold by Brewton. The company employs 240 employees as follows:

Eugene 130

Los Angeles 27

New York 30

Houston 25

Atlanta 28

Each of these locations has a warehouse manager, an administrative assistant, a human resources representative, sales and customer service coordinators, shipping and receiving personnel, and facilities maintenance personnel. All locations stock a full complement of Brewton products for delivery to purchasing customers. In addition to these functions, headquarters, located in Eugene, also provides human resources, purchasing analysts, sales and marketing personnel, accountants, systems personnel, and operations personnel.

Mark Brewton, the company’s founder, wants to implement a relational database management system (RDBMS) that would support his long-term vision in implementing comprehensive Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application to support the business now and in the future. He believes the business has grown to the point that such a system will streamline business processes, help control business expenditures, and better manage inventory levels, which presently do not seem to reflect accurate numbers for each distribution center. The new system will replace almost all of the computer applications currently in use in the company.

Users in the business functions of the organization use standalone software packages, each with its own database. The standalone software packages include a purchasing system, accounting and payroll applications, and a personnel-tracking system used by Human Resources. Because these applications do not share files, there are frequently situations in which employee and customer data do not match. When this happens, research must be conducted—and data updated in multiple places--to make the data consistent across all the standalone systems. The IT organization runs special programs developed to cross-compare the information and report mismatches among data files, which are then updated to reflect the correct information. The company currently does not have a disaster recovery plan or a business continuity plan to be followed in the event of a contingency situation, such as flooding or an earthquake, and management feels this situation should be addressed. The company needs to back up its databases to prevent data loss in the case of a disaster or other emergency.

Sales Department and Order Processing Form

Below is an example of the order processing form that needs to be entered into the sales system. It currently resides in a spreadsheet and the company is hoping to migrate this system to sales-specific software with an RDBMS backend.

Order number: 1234

Order Date: 5/12/18

Customer number 9876

Customer name: John Doe

Customer address: 456 Bishop Street Honolulu, Hawaii 96813

Tel: (808) 8650990

Sales agent: Lloyd Johnson