Huffman Company
Huffman trucking company is a nationwide transportation company. The company has 1,400 employees working in its logistical hubs located in Bayonne, New Jersey, St. Louis, Missouri, Los Angeles, California; and its central maintenance facility is in Cleveland, Ohio (University of Phoenix, 2012). Given that Huffman Trucking has several different location, their network is often ignored and their network is a big part in determining if they are going to be successful or not. I will be looking at their operating system and determining the usefulness of their system.
Huffman network consist of several different operating systems. The operating systems that are utilized at different facilities are mostly Windows based, with Windows 2000 servers, Windows SP, Windows NT, Microsoft Exchange and IIS. The office in Missouri uses a combination of different operating system, using some different windows base and some use the Macintosh environment. The Missouri office also uses Lotus Notes for email instead of using Microsoft Exchange.
The effects of this many operating systems are produced over time and are due to the growth of the company. The progress of Huffman caused them to increase and add systems as needed for the increase in demand for products or new business necessities. The development of the whole operating systems is due to necessity, but not essentially according to any plan. The result of having so many operating systems has eliminated consistency across the organization. Huffman’s network might be expensive for each plant and office due to training, expansion, and maintenance of all the different operating system. It will also be time consuming and expensive to transfer and translate information across the entire network due to the different operating systems.
For the Huffman Company the operating system is the key to business expansion. The company needs to get all the hubs together running all the same operating systems to allow for...