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The Tile Shop, Inc. Case Study |
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Solution Categories
Company ProfileThe Tile Shop is a national reseller of fine tile and stone. Their challenges are typical of growing companies, and The Tile Shop continues to work closely with Alto on thin-client and related systems.
Business SituationThe Tile Shop is a rapidly growing company with a central office in Plymouth, Minnesota with 15 stores located throughout the Midwest. They were using SCO/Unix to run their point-of-sale application from their central office. Unfortunately, the Unix system didn't integrate well with their accounting and inventory control systems and limited their ability to gather store activity information.
Alto's SolutionAlto was asked to plan and implement a cost effective, high-performance and scaleable solution to centrally manage a network that would integrate well with their Windows 32-bit accounting package. Alto recommended Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition with Citrix MetaFrame. This combination allowed utilization of the Windows NT desktop to support greater functionality. Alto then combined The Tile Shop’s Platinum accounting package with a Microsoft SQL Server database, and integrated this with a new Windows NT-based point of sale application. Next Alto tightly integrated this system with Microsoft Exchange Server for advanced messaging capability. Alto connected the remote sites to the central application server via Boundless thin-client terminals connected via a Frame Relay device, allowing remote invoice and receipt printing at each store.
Business BenefitAlto helped The Tile Shop maintain their cost effective central management capability, while adding the functionality, interoperability, and ease of use associated with Windows NT. Service to The Tile Shop customers has greatly improved due to real-time inventory updates. The Tile Shop is able to deploy additional applications over the network as their needs grow, without extraneous hardware and administration costs. In the future, thin-client technology will help The Tile Shop utilize products such as SQL Server to move into new business areas such as e-commerce. Their new Microsoft NT 4.0 platform will match their growing company perfectly.
Technologies Used
- Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition
- Citrix MetaFrame
- SQL Server
- Exchange Server
- Crystal Reports
- Visual Basic Enterprise Edition
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