Sharptooth Incorporated Stephen Kern is the founder and CEO of Sharptooth, a small business that buys and sells comic strips to magazines and newspapers around the country.

Some of Sharptooth's artists have made it big and are syndicated in hundreds of magazines and newspaper, while others are new to the industry.

Stephen started in the business as an artist and began contracting other artists when he realized he had a knack for promoting and marketing comic materials. Stephen's artistic background is great for spotting talented young artists, but not so great for running the business.

PROJECT FOCUS

Stephen recently began selling comics to new forms of media such as blog sites, Web sites, and other online tools. Stephen has hired you to build him a new system to track all online comic sales.

You quickly notice that Stephen has a separate system for each of his different lines of business including newspaper sources, magazine sources, billboard sources, and now online sources. You notice that each system works independently to perform its job of creating, updating, and maintaining sales information, but you are wondering how Stephen operates his business as a whole.

Create a list of issues Stephen will encounter if he continues to run his business with four separate systems performing the same operations.

What could happen to Stephen's business if he cannot correlate the details of each? Be sure to highlight at least 10 issues where separate systems could cause Stephen problems.