Store of the Future
To remain competitive in today’s technology-driven marketplace, Family Dollar Stores, Inc., one of the fastest growing discount retail store chains in the United States, envisioned creating the “Store of the Future,” a nationwide initiative to equip stores with progressive technologies to enhance the customer experience. As part of their vision, Family Dollar recognized the need to retire its point-of-service (POS) solution—a DOS-based platform implemented 15 years, 6,000 stores and 18,000 devices ago. The aging system lacked the ability to process credit, debit and EBT transactions, and the flexibility necessary to allow future expansion initiatives.
To accomplish their goals, Family Dollar Stores considered several solution alternatives and chose to partner with Intellinet infrastructure and development experts to modernize its POS solution. Leveraging Intellinet’s signature system integrator approach—extending the functionality of existing software to meet real world business challenges—Family Dollar deployed the Windows XP Embedded POS platform, Windows-based POS applications, SQL 2005 Express, and Systems Management Server (SMS) to broaden payment options, automate software distribution, manage security patches, provide custom reporting tools, and enable remote help desk functionality.
By aligning in-store processes with current marketplace trends using an automated, customized POS framework, Family Dollar’s “Store of the Future” goals were met, thus satisfying corporate business needs and the needs of customers and shareholders. As a result of the Family Dollar and Intellinet partnership, Family Dollar will save over 36,000 man-hours in deployment time. In addition, due to system automation, installations are two to three times faster than the original implementation of the POS platform and application. The use of SMS to manage the registers allows support staff to fix issues remotely rather than replace registers, and the integrated reporting function helps support staff identify potential problems before they become a disaster recovery scenario. Ultimately, Family Dollar is reaching deployment efficiency; shareholders are regaining profits; and customers are moving through the line quicker.
"It has been my experience
that the success of
such a significant endeavor
like the ‘Store of the
Future’ is contingent upon
having the right team with
the right skill set. That’s
why we chose to partner
with Intellinet."
- Josh Jewett
Senior Vice-President & CIO, Family Dollar
PerformancePoint Drills through Decision-Making
As business and revenue grew, Graham-Field's decision-makers and their supporting staff labored over nearly 300 different reports from disparate systems. Oftentimes the reports were built manually using Microsoft Access and Excel and, as a result, highly susceptible to calculation errors. In addition, the company's reporting solution made it difficult for users to locate information, required a significant number of resources, and took several weeks to generate financial and sales reports at the close of every quarter, severely delaying decision-making processes.
Realizing that their current solution would no longer sustain future growth, Graham-Field partnered with Intellinet for a more robust Business Intelligence (BI) solution that would bring clarity to the company’s increasing amounts of data and extract the actionable information needed to steer operational success.
To lay the foundation, Graham-Field and Intellinet assessed the company's current business health and strategically road mapped an iterative approach to implement a BI solution—including Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007—that would be flexible enough to grow with the business.
With the right BI solution in place, Graham-Field:
- Spends more time growing the business and less time on redundant, manual tasks
- Possesses the insight needed to trend and compare financial data with customer purchasing habits over various spans of time—a task that was previously unachievable—to reduce costs and uncover new business opportunities
More than just corporate reporting and a set of tools to extract data from enterprise systems, leading-edge organizations are using BI to make better decisions, faster.
“ The majority of our infrastructure to date runs on the Microsoft platform, so from a cost perspective, PerformancePoint Server 2007 just made sense. Intellinet then enabled us to reap the value of this solution by taking the time to understand our business, to uncover industry drivers, to develop a complete solution, and to decisively execute our plans."
- Alan Monahan, Chief Financial Officer,
Graham-Field Health Products
Innovative Use of SharePoint 2007 to Help You Prepare for 21st Century Threats
Is your organization prepared for the increasing threats of the 21st Century such as terrorism, pandemics, natural disasters, and workplace violence?
To help companies protect their most important assets—their people, operations, and brand—Preparis collaborated with Intellinet to design, develop and deploy the Enterprise Preparedness Platform™, a flexible, comprehensive emergency preparedness portal solution built on the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 platform.
- Through a sophisticated user interface, each client portal escapes the standard look and feel of a traditional SharePoint site and looks more like a corporate web site.
- In addition, content is managed centrally while maintaining custom branded sites for each client.
- In traditional portal sites, content is created and then identically replicated in the final location. However, through an innovative use of technology, Intellinet replicated content from a central location without replacing the custom information on each end portal site enabling Preparis to deliver real-time updates and users to access content relevant to their own organizations.
- By developing a "custom membership provider" web part in MOSS 2007, Preparis’ clients can send out text messages and tools to all of their employees globally or at specific locations at the touch of a button.
With Intellinet's portal solution, Preparis is able to supply vital, time-critical services in one solution while providing real-time feedback and analysis to their clients' management team.
“The need for a comprehensive Business Continuity Program is a topic of conversation in nearly every corporate boardroom across America. Through Intellinet's leadership, businesses can become certified in emergency preparedness within 90 days of activating the Preparis platform. Intellinet has greatly accelerated our time-to-market, and our customers are extremely pleased with the results.”
- Armistead Whitney,
Chief Executive Officer, Preparis
