Centric

Food for Thought

One of the nation’s largest supermarket chains were using a cumbersome and error prone manual process to collect information and reconcile physical inventories at each store twice a year.  The information came from hard copy reports from various mainframe systems, as well as hand written inventory forms completed by store managers.  Inventory numbers from these reports and forms were manually reconciled, and the store’s shrink was calculated.  The process typically required 90 minutes to complete.

A Better Way

The Company asked Centric to develop a multi-tiered web application to facilitate the electronic collection of the inventory data from both the mainframe systems and the store managers.

Centric Delivers

Working closely with key client personnel, Centric led the effort to develop and document requirements for the Inventory Reconciliation System (IRS), which included:

• Successful utilization of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) methodology which enabled the transition to RUP from a legacy waterfall methodology
• Development of data architecture and related processes to migrate data from the legacy mainframe systems to the web tier on a regular basis
• Successful construction of a Java web application that leveraged the Struts framework
• Development and successful implementation of a cut-over plan to the new IRS

Result

It now requires only about twenty minutes to reconcile physical inventory at each store, yielding an aggregate annual savings of more than 6,500 man-hours for the corporation.