IT systems review, real Sri Lankan manufacturer's retail showroom

Group coursework, but a real business, not a hypothetical: on-site research at a plastics manufacturer's retail showroom, mapping its actual IT system top to bottom rather than describing one from a textbook. I looked at the point-of-sale and inventory-control software the front and back end ran on, the hardware carrying it (terminals, magnetic-stripe card readers, dot-matrix printers up front and laser printers in back for the documents that needed to look sharper), and the network underneath it, topology, firewall, an intrusion-prevention setup, connecting the showroom back to head office and the factory.

The process side mattered as much as the components: quotation through invoicing, goods-received notes when stock arrived from the factory, sales returns updating inventory automatically once a cashier logged one.

It was my first time treating "how does this business actually run" as an engineering question rather than a business-studies one, walking a real system's failure modes and workarounds instead of a diagram of how one should work in principle.