AHOLD USA CONVERTING TO NEW DATA WAREHOUSE

Julie Gallagher

GREENVILLE, S.C. -- Ahold USA here has completed 75% of the conversion to a new data warehouse platform for customer data intended to deliver more targeted offers to shoppers of its four retail divisions, said Al Clevenger, director of data management and data warehouse services.

Ahold USA divisions, which encompass nearly 1,200 stores, include Stop & Shop, Quincy, Mass.; Tops Markets, Williamsville, N.Y.; Giant of Carlisle, Pa.; and Giant of Landover, Md.

As part of the conversion, Ahold USA is migrating terabytes of market basket data from its legacy data warehouse systems to the new platform, called the Performance Server data warehouse appliance, from Netezza, Framingham, Mass. Clevenger expects the new system to perform faster and more complex customer data analysis.

The Netezza platform will support customer information from all of Ahold USA's banners in a single data warehouse.

Data from databases are copied into data warehouses so that queries can be performed and reports developed, without disturbing the performance of other systems.

"With the legacy system, data would be several days old" by the time reports were created, said Clevenger. With the new platform, "our data will be a lot more current. That translates into better targeted customer offerings."

Ahold USA's analytic capabilities will also improve once it goes live on the new platform, he said. "It'll allow us to do more analysis with greater volumes of data."

Currently Ahold is migrating historical data to the new platform. It's on track to hit its 90-day implementation goal. Ahold is currently running stress tests and plans to go live with the system in March. "So far [the migration] has been relatively painless," Clevenger said.