Huffman trucking is a national transportation company that employs 1,400 people to work in its logistical hubs in Los Angeles, California, St. Louis, Missouri, and Bayonne, New Jersey, with its central maintenance facility located in Cleveland, Ohio.
Huffman Trucking currently employs running multiple Windows operating system platforms ranging from 3.X and 9.X to Windows 2000 Server and Pro and Windows XP Pro operating system. These multiple operating systems do not seem to have any type of standardization between the current Huffman Trucking physical locations.
I believe at the time as the company was transitioning from the older style pre computer days of running the business to adding computer systems to the company; the early 3.X and 9.X operating systems were a good fit for the early type of simple computer system. …show more content…
The early Windows operating system; such as the 3.X and the 9.X systems, which are being used throughout the company, were originally designed for personal computers.
According to Wikipedia.com (2011), “the Windows 9x operating system is designed as a single-user system. Thus, the security model is much less effective than the one in Windows NT.”
A key reason that the early 3.X and 9.X Windows operating systems were not intended for business use is the fact that they use a FAT file system; which are the only file system that is supported by Windows 9.X. According to Wikipedia (2011), “the FAT file systems have very limited security; every user that has access to a FAT drive also has access to all files on that drive. The FAT file systems provide no access control lists and file-system level encryption like NTFS.”
The early Windows 3.X and 9.X are an out-of-date system that Microsoft no longer offers support and that means that without support and no more licensing added, new updates, improvements and any type of security fixes are
non-existent.
Huffman Trucking does have some updated software; which includes the Windows Server 2000 and the Windows XP Pro operating systems. The biggest problem for Huffman Trucking is that there is no uniform operating system throughout the organization. For example if all the Window 3.X and 9.X machines and servers were updated to at least Windows XP Pro and Windows 2000 Server; this would create much more stability throughout the system because with the newer operating systems comes better reliability and security.
Huffman Trucking’s business relies heavily on logistics and logistics relies heavily on computer systems. Having a current model system would help the company to be more cost effective and efficient in how they run their day-to-day operations. Older, outdated computer systems have a tendency to be unstable and unpredictable and in the logistics business; having a computer system go down while trucks are on the road can have very dramatic effects on the operations of the business. Unsupported operating system that could go down at any time that could make or break their company or at the very least hurt the customer service and or the ability to dispatch and track drivers.
The mission statement of Huffman Trucking as stated on their website is “our mission is to be a profitable, growing, adaptive company in an intensively competitive logistical services business environment.” The first step in meeting these goals is to have a stable, reliable, and efficient operating system and by upgrading all of the aging systems that are no longer supported by the vendor to newer, supported operating systems that are supported will make the company’s ability to meet the mission goals that much easier
Reference:
Wikipedia (2011). Windows 9x. Retrieved 4-10-11, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_9x
Wikipedia (2011). History of Microsoft Windows. Retrieved 4-10-11, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Windows