STORES Magazine - May 2008 - (Page 83)

NUTS AND BOLTS / DATA SYNCHRONIZATION Re-tuning Harps Tech refresh boosts efficiency of regional supermarketer’s supply chain BY M.V. GREENE a rp s F o o d St ores, t h e august Springdale, Ark.based grocery chain, was re ve l i n g i n it s growth through the early part of the decade – until it began to get boxed into a corner by its technology. H Founded in 1930 by the husband-andwife team of Harvard and Floy Harp, the company takes pride in its humble beginnings feeding rural families in northwest Arkansas. Now competing in the shadow of Wal-Mart and its ever-increasing share of the grocery market, Harps’ growth strate“Things that used to take gy focuses on differen10 minutes, suddenly took tiation from its rivals 40 seconds. You can based on quality, servimagine how happy our ice and freshness. end users were about In recent years, the that.” chain has grown dramatically amid the re– Gary Bennett, Harps gins, Harps’ growth was stifling its supply chain through system inefficiency. Accounting, warehouse, general ledger, accounts receivable, payroll, inventory control and human resources all needed elbow room in the supply chain. Processes would bog down, crimping transaction performance and productivity, says Gary Bennett, Harps’ director of information systems. Harps needed a technology refresh — without rebuilding from scratch and pacity in its supply chain, Bennett began prowling around for a solution. The decision was made to continue with the Informix Dynamic Server, upgrading to Version 9.4 running on IBM System x with a Linux operating system to increase capacity and performance. Working with IBM turnkey partner Gillani, a Richardson, Texas, software developer of synchronized supply chain management applications, the upgrade migrated Harps’ business applications to Gillani’s FourGen CASE Tools, Version 8.1, an end-to-end supply chain management solution. The FourGen suite supports a concept called “modifiability-bydesign” that offers users the ability to upgrade and reconfigure underlying Informix infrastructure without disrupting ongoing business applications. The Linux operating platform provides users with a flexible and open architecture with lower overall total cost of ownership, according to Gillani. Automatic replenishment One warehousing feature supported by the upgrade is an auto replenishment system, Bennett says. The system tracks what each Harps store has sold and compares that data with product in the warehouse. “We know to automatically send product to that store again,” Bennett says. “That’s a very important process for us and it keeps the store managers from accidentally ordering from an outside vendor what we have on hand. Hopefully, the store manager will pretty much trust that they will be sent the things that they need.” Bennett says store growth tends to affect warehousing to a greater degree STORES / MAY 2008 83 modeling of stores, moves to larger buildings and the addition of units that brought to more than 50 its locations across Arkansas, Oklahoma and Missouri. The company also serves as a distributor to more than 200 independently-owned convenience stores. But in a dynamic retail environment characterized by tight operating marWWW.STORES.ORG breaking the bank. And it needed to ensure that all functions within the supply chain would gain from greater efficiency and data synchronization. Harps had been a loyal customer of the IBM Informix Dynamic Server since the mid-1990s; the server supports approximately 1,000 Harps programs. But it was running on a UNIX operating platform over outdated NCR hardware: it couldn’t marshal the speed required to complete online transactions or run batch processing jobs efficiently. And as the chain’s growth demanded more ca- http://WWW.STORES.ORG

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of STORES Magazine - May 2008

Stores - May 2008 Contents Executive Editor's Page President's Page Contrasting C-Level Compensation Across Segments What Shoppers Think 10 Things You May Have Missed Numbers Worth Counting Full Price/Markdown Retail People Cover Story: Concepts That Clicked Concept2Watch Kiosks Artificial Intelligence Tech Support Online LPinformation Data Synchronization Human Resources Site Selection POS Selection Communications Biometrics Networking Systems Credit Loeb Retail Letter Arts Update Point of View NRF News Retail Crossword Retail Industry Calendar Last Laugh

STORES Magazine - May 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.