Mary Kay is a cosmetics business which faced the problem that every company wished they had. They were growing so quickly that the system they have in place was no longer a viable option to process the orders they had coming in, which ranged from 25-30,000 per day. At the outset of the company, they had a decentralized system. This meant that the orders were scattered across 4 different mediums: web, phone, mail, and desktop computers, and many mistakes were made as a result. With over 850,000 IBCs each having the capability to create their websites (150,000 created), the burdens on the decentralized servers was becoming too large. So, Mary Kay switched to a centralized system which could handle the increased need for storage and could …show more content…

Under this infrastructure, there is little to no IT sharing, and each server is connected to a system of hardware which would provide it with the order information. Under this system, it proved difficult to process the orders, as each of the 40 parts of an order was processed inefficiently by the one server to which it was connected. Change was needed. Mary Kay chose to go with option 2, the centralized system, where although there is information sharing, it all occurs on one mainframe. Although this is slightly better than the previous system, it is still not entirely efficient because tasks cannot be broken down to run at the same time. In my final paragraph, I will state my recommendation as to which system the company should go with. I believe that under the current structure of Mary Kay cosmetics, the best network infrastructure to use would be a distributed network infrastructure. By creating a network of servers across the country, each individual task could be allocated to the most efficient place, meaning that the problem that Shreck highlighted of tasks not being able to be run simultaneously would be solved. Because there are still many input methods, this remains the most feasible option, as cloud, tiered, and client/server networks would not be compatible with the telephone, pc, and mail entries. With a distributed network infrastructure, Mary Kay can use the servers they already had in place under their decentralized system and spread them