Huffman Trucking Operating System Overview
Mark Jackowski

Huffman Trucking began as a small, one tractor-trailer operation in 1936 in Cleveland, Ohio. The company has seen major growth over the years, and now employees over 1,400 individuals and operates over 800 tractors. Along with this growth over Huffman Trucking’s life have undoubtedly come many changes: changes in personnel, changes in locations and facilities, changes in business processes and functions, and changes in its information systems as well. What began as a small, simple operation has now grown into a large, complex network of employees that must work together and communicate effectively in order to provide quality services for its customers. Huffman Trucking’s information system provides its employees with many of the tools necessary to provide these services, and the operating systems that it employs are a major component of that system. The company primarily runs Windows based operating systems, including Windows 95, 2000, 3.X, 9.X, and Exchange, but it also operates on other Novell systems in certain locations. This variety of operating systems can provide a wide variety of benefits in many situations. One OS might be better suited to handle certain company processes and functions, while other systems would work better handling others. Throughout the growth of Huffman Trucking, the company may have felt that a particular location would operate better using one OS over the other available options, and that could have been the motivating factor for which to use and where. Another could have been the economic factor at the time of the system’s implementation, as budget is a major factor in the majority of business decisions. I think that, perhaps, the lack of a company-wide plan for the structure of its information system led to deciding on the most convenient and readily available