An SMS-Based sales reporting system for a fashion-clothes franchising company

Franchising plays an important role in the economy. In the U.S., approximately one-third retail sales are from franchising companies. Many businesses use franchising as means of market expansion. In addition to less capital requirements, franchising is capable of expanding market share geographically in a short period of time. One of the important factors that determine the success of a franchising business is information efficiency. To keep up with the quick expansion of a franchising business, a company has to have a quick solution for a scalable information network. Traditional technology builds such network through heavy investment in network infrastructure. The requirements in initial capital investment in many cases put a brake on the adoption of the technology by franchising companies. Most off them are short on capital. As the development of Internet, browser/server technology has become an ideal choice for franchising business. Using Internet as its network help franchising companies to avoid the heavy initial network infrastructure investment. While Internet technology is still popular and is becoming a mainstream technology for business applications, we want to present an alternative wireless technology Short Message System (SMS). Comparing to Internet technology, SMS has pros and cons. The pros of SMS are its less requirement in initial capital investment, lower operating costs and easier implementation; the cons of SMS are its limitation on information volume and its weakness in information security. In the paper, we make a comparison among three different technologies to show the advantages of an SMS-based information system. We also use a real life example to show how to avoid the limitation of SMS by designing a communication scheme.