We-Grow Supply Company
 
The We-Grow Supply company is a farm supply company that buys, stores, and sells feed, seed,
fertilizer, and pesticide.  To be competitive, they need to automate their system for planning
purchases, tracking inventory, pricing, and handling sales.  The company has 400 retail stores
spread throughout the region.  The company hopes to open more stores in the future.
 
Each inventory item has a description and Stock-Item Classification (SIC).  Each SIC consists of
a code and a description.  An industry standard establishes the accepted SIC codes and their
descriptions.
 
To aid in planning purchases and pricing, the company needs to track sales statistics on a per
store basis.  The information should be detailed enough to identify seasonal trends and predict
overstocks and shortages.  All sales statistics, including inventory item, quantity, date of
purchase, need to be sent to the purchasers in main office on a daily basis.
 
The inventory-item prices change frequently and can vary from store to store.  Company
purchasers review and set items prices on a regular basis.  To simplify their jobs and reduce the
effort required to maintain price data, the purchasers set an item’s for a group of stores, instead
of individual stores.  For example, 10 lb. bags of wheat may be priced separately for the
Northern Stores and the Southern Store, horse bridles may be priced separately the Urban Stores
and Non-Urban Stores, and corn seed may be priced for just one group of stores that includes of
all them.  Marketing personnel and purchasers establish store groups for a variety of reasons,
including: distribution costs, regional demographics, regional agriculture, and geographic
locations.  Although each store may belong to many different groups, a item can only have at
most one price for each store.  In other words, the store groups for which an item is priced must
be non-overlapping.
 
Some inventory items may not be sold in some stores.  For example, a pesticide may be illegal in a
region, and therefore, not sold in that region.  A store may not currently have the items that it
sells in stock.  If an item is out-of-stock, then a sales clerk must be able to determine the closest
store that has the item in stock and request a transfer of the merchandise.  A sales clerk should
have immediate access to price information that is no older than one day for every item that the
store sells.  In the addition, a sales clerk should have access to fairly recent stock information for
all stores.