The Warehouse Group(MIS100 2010)

By Jess Meyer | Thursday, May 27 2010

2009 ranking: 24

Senior IS executive: Owen McCall, CIO
Reports to: CEO Ian Morrice
Size of IS shop: 113

PCs: 3342
Mobile PCs: 593
Terminals: 375
Hand-held devices: 1048
Total screens: 5358

Industry: Wholesale and retail trade
PC environment: HP, Javelin, Toshiba, Windows XP
Server environment: HP; IBM; Teradata; Dell; Windows 2008, 2003, 2000; Linux; VMS
DBMS: Teradata, Oracle, SQL
Address: 26 The Warehouse Way, Northcote, Auckland
Website:www.thewarehouse.co.nz
Key IS projects this year: Labour scheduling; voice picking; self checkout; multi-channel development; business continuity (virtual desktop); store back-office replacement.

Three major three-year initiatives were implemented in 2009, with the Warehouse Group looking to enable simplification and cost reduction through process automation, improve the quality and timeliness of the information presented to key decision makers to improve the effectiveness of their decisions, and to underpin the organisation’s investment into multi-channel retail. This year, specifically, CIO Owen McCall says the focus is to “support our business by using technology to reduce organisational costs, through simplification”.

Several new ICT investments are on the cards for the next 12 months, including CRM, and further investment in business continuity and disaster recovery. A full Citrix desktop virtualisation roll out across 600 users will take place by September this year, following a successful pilot, driven by the need to enhance business continuity and reduce risk. Specific projects requiring IS department focus and budget in 2010 include labour scheduling to support the company’s catchphrase “the right people, in the right place, at the right time, doing the right things”, as well as the implementation of a new voice picking solution for use in the warehouse, that will provide greater efficiency.

As self-service in retail becomes more prevalent globally and in New Zealand, The Warehouse Group has initiated an NCR self-checkout pilot in one store that has thus far achieved great results. Over the coming months, the functionality will be rolled out to more stores, though not at all of them. Two projects that will be rolled through all the stores are a new ticketing and pricing system, which will improve the company’s communication of price to the customer, and a full replacement of the store back-office.

Additional ICT focus will be placed on ongoing development of multi-channel opportunities.