HARP'S SETS CATEGORY MANAGEMENT

DENISE ZIMMERMAN

SPRINGDALE, Ark. -- Harp's Food Stores here is preparing to roll out a category management software program to all 28 stores, while at the same time upgrading financial and warehouse management systems at corporate headquarters.

By year-end, the company will have up to half its stores on-line with a wide area network linked to category management software residing at the corporate level, said Jim Antz, director of management information systems.

"It will allow us to post our own stores, retrieve item movement back from the stores and feed it into the category management systems, giving [buyers] feedback and the ability to see the results of their actions," he said.

Once all stores are on-line with the network, Harp's expects labor savings and enhanced accuracy at the store level, where staff will download item pricing data from headquarters, rather than enter the information manually.

"We expect to increase sales and gross at the stores using the category management system to identify and eliminate slow movers -- and to have better control of the prices," Antz said. Harp's pricing and category management software package is from Bass, Dayton, Ohio.

The new program will run on an NCR 3525 Unix-based operating system that replaced Harp's nine-year-old IBM System/36 last May.

On the distribution side, Harp's is upgrading software and introducing radio frequency technology to its 75,000-square-foot warehouse here. The warehouse management package, from Fourgen Software, Seattle, will help Harp's move to a paperless environment, Antz said.

At headquarters here, the company is moving forward with all new financial applications, also from Fourgen, which should be completely operational by year-end.

Antz said Harp's software and hardware upgrades are part of a larger effort to "do things smarter, eliminate bottlenecks and eliminate costs from the system." The program is projected to deliver a 30% return on investment over five years' time, he added.