As a consultant you have been asked by the Universal Retail Corporation (URC) to develop an implementable project plan for a point of sale and stock control system for a proposed chain of retail outlets across Australia. You have been supplied the following information, information not available maybe assumed, this will be a competitive bid targeting the dual goals of quick implementation and low cost.

Universal Retail Corporation (URC) is an aggressive player in the growing electronic gadgets market with a plan to open a chain of retail outlets to further their growth in the market and to combat the growing competitive threat from online purchases. Outlets will be located in major cities in seven states. The larger cities will have more than one store. Critical to sales is monitoring sales and stock turn to ensure adequate stock is available when demanded. Each store will be responsible for day-to-day operations, however, there is a strong central management structure at the national level.

The services provided by the organization include volume buying to gain discounts, pricing,merchandising strategies, and consolidation of performance reporting for the corporate management.The Information Systems Department at URC's corporate office has been given the assignment to develop a transaction processing system that will apply modern RFID (Radio frequency identification) code scanning, starting at the warehouse and linking to points of sale, to provide automatic inventory control. The system will also relieve the store personnel of the tedious task of generating sales and performance reports as required by the head office.

An earlier project has successfully defined the store level hardware that will be used at the points of transaction plus the "cloud" communications network that will connect the stores with the state offices. This hardware consists of