A system outage could cause a monumental loss of revenue. Ayers and Admire rely on mainframes for customer service, order entry and shipping applications. In fact, systems problems haven't brought down preholiday catalog operations in Ayers' 14 years with the company. Reliability isn't the only thing mainframes have going for them. Lands' End's order-entry system is blazingly fast, consistently providing subsecond response time.
Customer representatives use dumb terminals connected to the mainframe via a token ring network.
If service representatives are sitting and waiting for the screens to refresh, conversations drag and that drives up costs. After the system authorizes credit card transactions and corrects errors, it passes the order along to a mainframe that handles customer service, shipping and billing. Mainframe applications process the order and determine box sizes and shipping methods. The applications also assign tracking numbers to each package - a must when 290,000 orders are processed during the peak holiday week, Admire says. Ayers spends the first half of the year reviewing the previous holiday season's call and sales figures and planning for the next one.