Canterbury Convenience Stores (CCS) is a newly formed organization in Christchurch, New Zealand. It comprises 10 moderately sized convenience stores that previously operated independently of each other. Each store has from three to six checkout lanes.

The owners of the stores have decided to establish CCS as a cooperative to take advantage of discounts they can obtain from bulk buying and to reduce the administrative and advertising costs associated with their operations. The prices for products sold will be set by the central administration for CCS, although the manager of each store will have the option of varying prices within their store if they so wish. On average, it is expected that managers will decide upon price variations from the centrally set price for less than 12 percent of items offered in each store. The managers will still retain substantial autonomy over how they run their stores, however, because they are concerned to preserve the local-neighborhood characteristics of their stores.

One matter considered at a joint meeting of the store managers is whether they should replace their existing cash registers with point-of-sale equipment. Several of the younger managers have argued that CCS should establish a central price file and inventory file that can be accessed by pointof-sale terminals in each of the stores. They believe this approach will result in reduced overheads, more accurate pricing, and improved inventory control in their stores. A few of the older managers are reluctant to proceed in this way, however. They are concerned that prices will no longer appear on the products they sell. Moreover, they question what will happen if the system fails at any time. They argue they compete effectively against the larger supermarkets only because they offer better service to their customers. They wonder what will happen if they have a system failure and they then have difficulties transacting business with their customers. If they cannot input sales because the system is down, what will happen to their local-neighborhood, high-quality personalized service image?

Required: You are an information systems auditor in the accounting firm that CCS has retained to provide financial services. CCS has asked your firm to provide advice on whether a suitable point-of-sale system can be designed that will allow each store to continue to transact business in the event of system failure. Can you devise a design for the system that will mitigate their concerns?