Natural Best Health Food Stores

Natural Best Health Food Stores is a chain of health food stores serving Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas. Garrett Davis opened his first Natural Best Health Food Store in 1975 and has since opened fifteen stores in three states. Initially, he sold only herbal supplements, gourmet coffees and teas, and household products. In 1990, he expanded his product line to include personal care, pet care, and grocery items.

In the past several months, many of Mr. Davis's customers have requested the ability to purchase prepackaged meals, such as chicken, turkey, fish, and vegetarian, and have these prepackaged meals automatically delivered to their homes weekly, biweekly, or monthly. Mr. Davis feels that this option is vi- able because Natural Best has an automatic delivery system in place for its existing prod- uct lines.

With the current system, a customer can subscribe to the Natural Best Delivery Ser- vice (NBDS) and have personal care, pet care, gourmet products, and grocery items delivered on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis. The entire subscription process takes approximately five minutes. The salesclerk obtains the customer's name, mailing ad- dress, credit card number, desired delivery items and quantity, delivery frequency, and phone number. After the customer's subscrip- tion has been processed, delivery usually be- gins within a week. As customer orders are placed, inventory is automatically updated. The NBDS system is a client/server system. Each store is equipped with a client com- puter that accesses a centralized database housed on a central server. The server tracks inventory, customer activity, delivery sched- ules, and individual store sales. Each week the NBDS generates sales summary reports, low-in-stock reports, and delivery schedule reports for each store. The information con- tained on each of these individual reports is then consolidated into master sales summary, low-in-stock, and forecasting reports. Infor- mation contained on these reports facilitates restocking, product delivery, and forecasting decisions. Mr. Davis has an Excel worksheet that he uses to consolidate sales information from each store. He then uses this worksheet to make forecasting decisions for each store.

a. Identify the different types of information systems used at Natural Best Health Food Stores. Provide an example of each. Is an expert system currently used? If not, how could Natural Best benefit from the use of such a system?

b. Figure 1-4 identifies seven characteris- tics of a system. Using the Natural Best Health Food Stores scenario, provide an example of each system characteristic.

c. What type of computing environment does Natural Best Health Food Stores have?