Bsa 310 - Huffman Trucking

Huffman Trucking

BSA 310

09/15/2011

Frank Skowron

Huffman Trucking began its start as "H. Huffman Trucking" in 1936 and consisted of one tractor trailer doing hauls around Cleveland, Ohio. Today what began as H. Huffman Trucking has now transformed into Huffman Trucking a national transport company consisting of four major hubs located in Los Angeles, California, St. Louis, Missouri, and Bayonne, New Jersey; and its central hub in Cleveland, Ohio. Huffman trucking now has 925 employees and has 425 support employees. Huffman has also been recognized as the 1st major freight carrier to outsource all of its information technology systems support (Huffman 2005).

The issue with the organization of the information structure is that there is no continuity throughout the hubs and departments. Most of the systems at all of the offices are Windows based, for instance; the California office uses windows 3x and 9x environments it has a bus topology no firewall a POTS telephone system and uses an AOl mail service, Missouri offices use a mixed windows and Macintosh environment and has barcode scanners, New jersey uses windows 3x and 9x and has a thin client environment, and the hub in Chicago uses the same topology and equipment that is found in the Missouri office.

Usually a mixed environment like what is found at Huffman will evolve over time due to expansion and need of the company. It seems that the topologies were forged out of necessity and not overall planning. The issue with this lack of continuity is that maintenance and use of the systems can be costly. That is because there is the issue of different maintenance, training and different expansion needs between all of the offices and plants. Any new programs that are introduced would have to be tested across all of the offices due to compatibility issues and any information sent from one plant to another would have to be translated in order to be viewed in the different environments. This issue of delay and miscommunication can ultimately trickle down and cause issue for the customer. This is the company's greatest asset.

It would be more feasible for the company to overhaul all of its offices and include a shared database. With regards to the use of barcode scanners it would be more efficient for the company to use this shared database to better track inventory from each office. It would be fairly simple to upgrade the New Jersey and California offices to the system being used in the Missouri and Chicago offices. Also the use of an email server that is unified across all offices will better allow them to access each other. This will also cut down on the miscommunication of memos and scheduled meetings.

In addition to the benefit