A distributed software application case study

Should the recommendation be for each 'branch' grocery store to be connected to the 'central' grocery store software? As an example if (me) a customer purchases (say three boxes of cereal and 1 gal. of milk) at a branch store, the clerk checks my purchases out and obtains a cash receipt. Shouldn't the 'software' recommendation be to not have each branch manually deduct 3 boxes of cereal and 1 gal of milk - but instead have it be done automatically when a customer is checked out? By some way of having a main program utilized by all grocery branches including the central office? how would this work?

What are your thoughts? Is there a different approach do you think? Again I'm not looking for charts, pseudocode or any of that. Just need to understand the logic in how to begin the design of this.

Case Study
You are an outside consultant to a large chain of grocery stores. The store's management would like to dynamically check the store's inventory from the central office. They presently take the cash register receipts and deduct the items from the last physical inventory. The inventory is sent to the central office once a week. Once received at the central office, the data is hand entered into spreadsheets.
Present your research and recommendations to the board of directors on how to modernize their business. The board of directors is not very computer literate; they are all business majors. You have determined that using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams would be part of your presentation. You will also include a pseudo code, flowcharts, data dictionaries, and hierarchy charts illustrating your complete solution.
Your final document should contain a "hierarchy chart" of phases, flowcharts, pseudo code, data dictionary, and seven UML diagrams as developed in Visio and Word. Your document should also contain a paragraph narrative on how each diagram relates to the solution. Copy/paste your Visio diagrams into an MS Word document for submission.
Your submission should include 6 to 8 pages of Visio developed UML diagrams (minimum of six different ones), hierarchy chart, and flowcharts; copy/paste into a MS Word document that also contains the pseudo code and data dictionary for the solution.
You are an outside consultant to a large chain of grocery stores. The store's management would like to dynamically check the store's inventory from the central office. They presently take the cash register receipts and deduct the items from the last physical inventory. The inventory is sent to the central office once a week. Once received at the central office, the data is hand entered into spreadsheets.
Present your research and recommendations to the board of directors on how to modernize their business. The board of directors is not very computer literate; they are all business majors. You have determined that using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams would be part of your presentation. You will also include a pseudo code, flowcharts, data dictionaries, and hierarchy charts illustrating your complete solution.
Your final document should contain a "hierarchy chart" of phases, flowcharts, pseudo code, data dictionary, and seven UML diagrams as developed in Visio and Word. Your document should also contain a paragraph narrative on how each diagram relates to the solution. Copy/paste your Visio diagrams into an MS Word document for submission.
Your submission should include 6 to 8 pages of Visio developed UML diagrams (minimum of six different ones), hierarchy chart, and flowcharts; copy/paste into a MS Word document that also contains the pseudo code and data dictionary for the solution.