Personal Trainer, Inc. owns and operates fitness centers in a dozen Midwestern cities. The centers have done well, and the company is planning an international expansion by opening a new “supercenter” in the Toronto area. Personal Trainer’s president, Cassia Umi, hired an IT consultant, Susan Park, to help develop an information system for the new facility. During the project, Susan will work closely with Gray Lewis, who will manage the new operation.

Background

Susan and Gray finished their work on user interface, input, and output design. They developed a user-centered design that would be flexible and easy to learn. Now Susan turned her attention to the architecture for the new system.

Susan wanted to consider their own organization and culture, enterprise resource planning, total cost of ownership, scalability, Web integration, legacy systems, processing methods, security issues, and corporate portal. She also needed to select a network plan, or topology, that would dictate the physical cabling and network connections, or consider a wireless network. When all these tasks were completed, she would submit a system design specification for approval.

Tasks

A. What would be the advantages of selecting an Internet-based architecture for the Personal Trainer’s system?

B. If Personal Trainer wants to increase its Internet marketing efforts, what advice could you offer? Perform research to find out more about the topic of Web-based marketing before you answer Gray.

C. What software and hardware infrastructure will be necessary to ensure Personal Trainer can process point of sale transactions?

D. Prepare an outline for a system design specification and describe the contents of each section.