Foodstuffs Co-operative Society Wellington(MIS 100 2009)

By CIO staff | Friday, July 24 2009

2008 ranking: 32

Senior IS executive: Egon Guttke, group manager IT
Reports to: CEO
Size of IS shop: 62

PCs: 2090
Mobile PCs: 500
Terminals: 245
Hand-held devices: 80
Total screens: 2915

Industry: Wholesale and retail trade
PC environment: Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP; Dell; HP
Server environment: Dell, Unisys, IBM, Windows 2000
DBMS: Informix, SQL
Address: 57 Kiln Street, Silverstream, Upper Hutt
Website: www.foodstuffs.co.nz
Key IS projects this year: Not disclosed.

Foodstuffs (Wellington) Co-operative Society is one of three separate, regionally-based and retailer-owned co-operative companies of the Foodstuffs organisation. The three co-operatives have a close working relationship and they jointly own Foodstuffs (NZ) Ltd, which acts as their federation body. Foodstuffs (NZ) Ltd owns the intellectual property in Foodstuffs brand names, but does not trade in its own right and is not a holding company. The company provides a means of co-ordinating policy and national activities and representing the collective interests of the Foodstuffs companies at industry level, to the government and to the public.

Egon Guttke is group manager IT for Foodstuffs Wellington. In 2007, Guttke said Foodstuffs Co-operative Society spends on disaster recovery programmes to ensure the company can continue to run its business in adverse situations. Point of Sale systems and electronic payment systems are also critically important to retail organisations, and there is a need to comply with new standards for EFT terminals. Network connections are similarly critical, as is the cost of business telecommunications services.

In 2008, Foodstuffs Co-operative Society announced it had
introduced voice picking technology into its warehouses so supermarket orders can be placed electronically, translated to voice commands and pickers can work hands-free. The new system improves both picking productivity and accuracy.

On the e-commerce front, Foodstuffs Cooperative Society is active in B2B models in conjunction with the two other Foodstuffs companies. As well, its Global Standards 1 project places information on goods and bar codes in a central data repository, while allowing organisations to tap into that data repository and download information to their own systems.