Windows 2003 Server) located in the company’s IT headquarters in La Coruña, each handling
computations for about one half of the stores. The implementation also required the in‐house
development of a client application distributed on the PCs of the approximately 60 employees
of the warehouse allocation team. This second application was developed with Visual FoxPro
and provides an interface allowing these employees to request additional runs of the core
computational application in order to perform what‐if scenario analysis; visualize and manually
modify any output of the optimization model; and finally communicate their chosen solution to
the existing warehouse control systems effectively implementing the physical picking, sorting,
packing and truck loading operations corresponding to the shipments determined by the
warehouse allocation team using the decision support system just described – see Figure 5 for a
screen snapshot of this client application. Finally, the data communications infrastructure
supporting these applications relies to date on Inditex’s standard virtual private network (VPN),
however a more efficient node‐based infrastructure is under deployment.