The Warehouse Group(MIS100 2009)

By CIO staff | Friday, July 24 2009

2008 ranking: 21

Senior IS executive: Owen McCall, CIO
Reports to: Ian Morrice, CEO
Size of IS shop: 122

PCs: 3640
Mobile PCs: 610
Terminals: 205
Hand-held devices: 1913
Total screens: 6368

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: Website development, self check-out, labour scheduling, business continuity, shelf edge labels.

The Warehouse Group’s business strategy is focused on the execution of five strategic initiatives: To use customer insight to grow sales profitably; improve execution through simplification; reduce costs; develop multiple channels; be a leader in the community and environment.

CIO Owen McCall says a major focus of the past five years has been to improve the reliability and cost effectiveness of systems. With this largely achieved, the IS team’s focus is on how it can now leverage these systems to enable key business initiatives. Overall, ICT budgets remain flat year on year. However, as ICT operational costs have fallen there is an increasing focus on investing for the future of the organisation.

“We are looking at three key initiatives this year and over the next three years. The first is to enable simplification and cost reduction through process automation. The second is to improve the quality and timeliness of the information we present to our key decision makers to improve their decision effectiveness and, finally, to underpin our investment into multi-channel retail,” says McCall.

Key ICT projects over the next 12 months are investment in business intelligence systems, particularly promotional and product lifecycle analytics and scorecards, and moving IS disaster solutions to more fully functional business continuity solutions. Software and server virtualisation projects are ongoing, and investments in multi-channel and supply-side e-business initiatives are planned and underway. McCall says labour scheduling processes and systems, along with PCI DSS compliance are other significant areas of investment for the group this year.