How a European Grocery Chain Makes Progress

Challenge:

Improve operational efficiency to optimize profitability in the food retail industry, renowned for its razor thin margins.

Solution:

Integrate the IT systems of 800+ geographically-dispersed stores and provide real-time business information over often-unstable networks using the Progress® Sonic® ESB—for centralized deployment and management, multi-site integration, and zero downtime.

Benefit

Real-time pricing information at the fingertips of decision makers to increase revenues, plus lower IT costs.

The Vision: Greater Operational Efficiency

A large European grocery chain went shopping for new IT infrastructure. The time was ripe for a change. The company had hundreds of stores inside and outside of its own country and was beefing up its acquisitions in other countries. At the same time, with thin margins typical of the grocery retail industry, it wanted to improve operational efficiency: to minimize costs.

This wasn't easy—with communications only once a day. At the time headquarters and the remote supermarkets abroad exchanged information by batch file transfer—if it was successful. The markets sent sales and inventory data to headquarters at the end of the day from the point-of-sale (POS) and order systems (GS4) to the central ERP system. Headquarters provided pricing updates to the stores from the same ERP system nightly. The company needed near-real-time information to improve its business. But all of this hinged on integrating 100s of stores.

A messaging solution could replace batch updates and integrate the stores, but it would have to be able to overcome substantial obstacles. Sonic ESB could do it all.

Unstable Networks, Few Local IT Resources

The stores requiring the IT update were frequently in areas with unstable networks, dial-up connections, and low bandwidth. These conditions had made the daily batch updates subject to delays and failures, for example, resulting in late pricing updates for discounts and, therefore, missed sales.

These technical problems sometimes required manual IT intervention. The company had a substantial IT staff for development and support centralized in headquarters. But it kept only minimal IT staff in other countries for basic maintenance. This was more cost-efficient. Besides, it was difficult to find qualified people in some regions.

There was also an inherent problem in large, distributed rollouts to about 500 stores, a number that was growing. Such rollouts typically involve a lot of software (e.g., containers, brokers, etc.) and IT labor to re-create the configuration on each remote machine. The result is many mistakes—and high costs. These difficulties were exacerbated by the small number of IT people in the regions plus the company's tight timeframe—six months—for deploying the new solution before it installed a new POS technology in some of its markets abroad.

Sonic Delivers the Goods

The company looked for a solution that could provide fast, cost-effective multi-site integration, reliable near-real-time information, and rapid deployment. At the same time, the solution needed to overcome the implementation and operational obstacles and minimize IT labor and costs.

Specific requirements for the infrastructure included guaranteed message delivery and the ability to function 24x7 (except for scheduled maintenance every two months). The solution also needed to be able to handle high-volume traffic—once 600 stores were online there would be 2,500-3,000 cash operations/minute—and needed to scale easily and cost-effectively to accommodate growth. But the key was fast, easy deployment. This was the focus of the proof-of-concept (POC).

The company chose Sonic ESB and Progress® Sonic® Deployment Manager (SDM) because Sonic had the features that could make the company's vision a reality:

• Automated deployment—fast, reliable, repeatable, and centralized. With Sonic, the grocery chain could (and did) develop a single deployment package and roll it out to all the stores from a central location, without needing IT resources abroad and without error-prone repetitive manual tasks. The company could also roll out or roll back changes in a reproducible fashion for easier future upgrades. As a result, it could decrease the time and costs of a large, distributed deployment as well as future support and maintenance.
  
  
• A lightweight, distributed architecture with centralized management. Sonic ESB runtime components—containers and brokers—run in a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and use less memory than an application server. So there is no requirement for an application stack in each location. This would help the company cut costs and achieve easy distribution and scaling—without local resources. In addition, using Sonic ESB the company can automatically provision services and processes to remote locations. Just as important, the company can easily monitor and manage the entire distributed ESB network from a central location with the Sonic Management Console.
  
  
• Reliable, robust, standards-based messaging—even over unstable networks. Sonic ESB could provide standards-based, comprehensive integration (for connecting to the data warehouse) as well as guaranteed message delivery with zero downtime even over unstable networks. The key was a combination of its Continuous Availability Architecture™ and Dynamic Routing Architecture (DRA). CAA provides rapid communication failover in a clustered pair of brokers without added, expensive third-party products. If the primary broker fails, processing continues on the "hot" standby broker transparent to services. In-flight transactions are not rolled back. No recovery of transaction logs is required so there's no downtime.
  
  

DRA enables cross-cluster routing without manual modeling, even to LAN segments and remote sites. With DRA the company could overcome the problem of high-latency WAN connections and receive error-free performance over dial-up and other less robust connections.

Immediate and Continuing Results

During the POC, Sonic proved itself immediately. Using the Sonic Deployment Manager, the Progress team was able to deploy a software package to three remote markets in one and one half days while the competition took ten days to deploy its software to one store. By 2007 the company had created a standard Sonic ESB software package and could install 10-to-15 shops per hour from its headquarters.

By the end of that year, the company had 800 markets (at home and in other countries) online and was using Sonic ESB with about 1200 Sonic containers managed by a cluster of management components. So the grocery chain achieved its goal of integrating multi-site operations and providing near-real time pricing and inventory information—for greater operational efficiency.