A car dealership needs to have information in their data warehouse regarding their vehicle inventories. The frequency of updating the inventory would vary depending upon the size of the dealership. Some dealerships have very low volume and a small number of vehicles. It would be easy to scan the car lot to see which vehicles are available for sale. Dealerships that have large inventories lend a different level of complexity to the situation. Some dealerships have hundreds of vehicles and dozens of salespeople. The salespeople definitely do not have a way to keep up with what other salespeople have going on in the way of sales, test-drives, and potential sales. For these larger dealers, each time a vehicle is taken for a test drive, the key would need to be “checked out” and logged into the computer. This information would need to be real-time so that each salesperson could easily check to see which vehicles are available to be test-driven and/or sold. Furthermore, each time a customer purchases a vehicle, that transaction would also need to be logged and be able to be viewed in real-time. Again, this would be done to allow all salespeople the opportunity to see which vehicles are still available for sales.
As new vehicles are received by the dealership, they too would need to be logged into the system. This could be done in batch processing at night as long as it would be done every night in order to keep an accurate tally on the inventory. If deliveries are received throughout the day, a real-time accounting of new vehicles received could allow for more sales. If a potential customer is thinking of buying a particular vehicle, but the dealership does not have the color the customer wants, a sale could be lost. If, by chance, a shipment of vehicles arrives during the day and the customer’s preferred color is in the shipment, the sale is much more likely to occur. This would be a good reason to keep the inventory up to date on a real-time basis.
The backup of the inventory of a car dealership should be done daily. This should occur at night when the system is not being used for any other processing. Since each sale is accompanied by a large amount of paperwork, each vehicle that has been sold on a particular day is easy to keep track of. Backing up the system throughout the day would use valuable computing time, potentially interfere with transactions in process, and confuse salespeople as to which vehicles are available for sale.
If, for some unforeseen reason, the system goes down or crashes during the day, personnel can easily check the paperwork of in-process sales and completed sales then update the information to correct the inventory prior to the next day’s business. This could be time consuming if a lot of sales had been made, but the occurrence should not be very frequent and the benefits of only backing up the system in batch processing overnight outweigh the risk of having to manually go through the paperwork.