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LEAN AND MEAN

WEST VALLEY CITY, Utah -- Once upon a time, long, long ago, tech support was easy. No workstations were data centers -- they all linked back to a mainframe -- and a simple green light was the basis of most troubleshooting.Green light on: "good." Green light off: "We'll send you a new one."Much has changed and now nearly every device in the store has its own computing platform. Help desks are a vital

WEST VALLEY CITY, Utah -- Once upon a time, long, long ago, tech support was easy. No workstations were data centers -- they all linked back to a mainframe -- and a simple green light was the basis of most troubleshooting.

Green light on: "good." Green light off: "We'll send you a new one."

Much has changed and now nearly every device in the store has its own computing platform. Help desks are a vital cog in keeping the stores running, and the information technology support staff spends a lot of time fixing and maintaining equipment.

Why not?

It's big dollars off the bottom line.

But it's back to the future here at Harmons, which is taking out the commonly used personal computer-based networks from its stores and replacing them with thin-client terminals.

These terminals are called "thin" because they only process keyboard input and screen output, with all other data processing relegated to the back-office server at headquarters. Except for the point-of-sale, all the databases are maintained at headquarters and they are accessed via the browser-based thin-client terminals over a wide area network, said Ken Pink, vice president, information systems.

"At the end of the day, what we try to do is sell groceries and what IT tries to do is support that. For us, it made perfect sense that our model should take as much frustration and user support as we can out of the equation," Pink said.

The 10-store operator started moving in the direction of thin-client architecture about four years ago, he said.

"We found that all our technical people were just trying to keep stuff running. Maintenance ended up being their whole job," Pink said. "We were drowning in the proliferation of disparate Windows-based systems."

After a year of research, Harmons eventually chose the Retail.net enterprise software from Tomax Corp., Salt Lake City.

The system went live at a store a year ago and by the end of this year, it will be implemented at all stores.

The thin-client terminal is the IBM NetVista Internet appliance, which accesses the IBM RS2000 server at headquarters over the wide area network.

A store that opened in January had all thin-clients, as will another new store planned for next January, Pink said.

Meanwhile core back-office applications -- pricing, direct-store delivery, expert pricing and merchandising -- are being put in the hands of stores through a Tomax process called San Juan.

"It brings an ability to take a very complicated product that tracks inventory, movement, pricing and promotions, and simplifies that for the end user," he said. The stores see only the information they need on customized screens.

"We try not to lose sight of the fact that we are trying to run grocery stores and not be computer whizzes at the store level. So we are trying to extract the complexity of the product and just create some workflow-based screens," Pink said.

The Harmons approach saves on technical support, provides the information needed by the stores faster, and updates pricing and other data more quickly. It accomplishes tasks in days that take other retailers months. Projects that take days for others, take minutes for Harmons.

With this system, Harmons is not simply ahead of other supermarket retailers, said consultant and former Kroger executive Thomas D. Murphy, president, Peak Tech Consulting, Colorado Springs, Colo. "Harmons is in a different ZIP code from the rest of the industry," he said. To his knowledge, Harmons is the only supermarket retailer that has gone this far with thin-client architecture.

Murphy said, when he was at Kroger, he was looking at the possibility of a thin-client system, but then the Fred Meyer Inc. merger came along, sidelining all other projects. "There's no question in my mind that over time, the grocery industry will go this way. They will take it in bits and pieces. Some of them will look at it and decide to put it into a five-year strategic plan," he said, noting that this is not the simple tactical procurement of a piece of equipment.

He predicted that another group of early adopters would go to Harmons' level over the next year. "Then over the next two to five years, I think you will see a fair percentage of the chains go in this direction," Murphy said.

Thin-client will be a disruptive technology in the supermarket industry, he said. "It is going to revolutionize the way that you do things. A grocery chain lives and dies by its ability to execute and its level of discipline inside the store. If you can have a onefold or a tenfold improvement in that discipline and execution in the store, it is worth megamoney," Murphy said.

"We want to make it the simplest and most reliable system for our end-user," Pink said. "That helps IT and it helps our end-user. This seems like the most logical model to do that. It's very automated and requires very little intervention from a technology perspective," he said.

Pink spoke hesitantly when asked whether it should be adopted by other retailers. "I don't see how it couldn't spread because when we look at our support costs in terms of our calls and hours spent at the stores that are thin-client deployed, they are in fact significantly less than the stores that we haven't fully converted yet. So if I take off my Harmons hat for a minute, I think it has to spread," he said.

"But from Harmons' perspective, I hope it takes awhile because it is a competitive advantage for us in our market. I can deploy applications more quickly and more reliably than the folks around the corner can and, at the end of the day, that's what competitive advantage is all about. So I really see this architecture as pretty sweeping," Pink said.

Harmons Likes Its Efficiency, Reliability

With most databases and processing removed from the stores with its thin-client architecture, Harmons' back office takes on greater importance.

The central server supports point-of-sale systems at the store, but to protect against any kind of a network outage, they are the only stand-alone systems at Harmons with their own price databases.

While most stores have two price databases, Harmons' system requires only one.

"We get to lose a step there," said Ken Pink, vice president, information systems, Harmons.

So far, the reliability of Harmons' systems has been excellent compared to other systems, he said.

Instead of maintaining individual machines at the stores, it is mostly all handled on the server in the back office, he said.

In the rare event of a wide area-network problem, the system shifts to a dial-in back-up line.

"Most of our applications are either Oracle Tools- or Lotus Notes-based and those are proven technologies and dead reliable -- we have never lost a byte of data or corrupted or killed an application. We've had networks go down, we've had to shut systems down to do upgrades and scheduled maintenance, but overall it's been very, very reliable," Pink said.

Harmons' corporate intranet has about 65 applications on it.

"They range from something as simple as requesting a sign for your store, to as something sophisticated like creating a new associate for the payroll system, and anything in between. We view the intranet as the one place where a Harmons associate would have to go to interact with Harmons from a communications perspective or a workflow perspective. We want everything to happen from the intranet application," he said.

Since the system was designed in recent years, Harmons asked Tomax to prepare it for the business-to-business Internet transactions.

"It was clearly identified to Tomax that they have to be able to support both classical EDI and XML-based transactions, which they do. We've already started working with some of our smaller vendors to create some business-to-business processes. Harmons in the past has been not a big enough company to participate in traditional VAN-based EDI, but we are sure we can participate in the XML, Internet-based EDI and we have certainly looked at the GlobalNetXchanges and WorldWide Retail Exchanges of the world as part of our future," Pink said.

TAGS: Kroger