Project Overview
You sold $700 million worth of music CDs from 90 retail stores last year. Why in the name of the eight-track tape would you want to sell digital music files online?

Well, for starters, that revenue is down $50 million from the year before. And it's $300 million less than five years ago—you remember, back when you still had 120 stores. This digital thing just may have a bit more of a future than the eight-track. Time to set up a system that will deliver your products, in digital form, to the steadily growing wave of shoppers who buy music online.

You'll want help from a consultant to assess the system's needs and put the pieces in place during the one-year startup. Your goal is to have a pilot online store with a catalog of 5,000 songs fully operational by the end of the startup year. And while you'll start small, scalability will be the key; create a system that can expand as quickly as the market demands. The biggest cost will be the custom-built Java application that will manage everything from Web-based user transactions to royalty payments. The system will need its own database, which must integrate with key enterprise applications, such as sales and accounting. For security reasons, you'll host the system yourself, so budget for dedicated bandwidth and scalable server and storage hardware.

If you hit your goal of 5,000 download sales a day after the first year of operation, you'll break even on costs. The roughly $1.8 million in new revenue won't put a dent in your CD sales. But a little investment now just may keep you from joining the eight-track tape in oblivion.

To read the details behind this planner and to fill in your own numbers, download the worksheet by clicking on the Tool icon above..