Bill GoodwinHigh street retailer the Co-operative Wholesale Society plans to
make big savings on IT costs, by bringing its operations back
in-house, following its merger with the Co-operative Retail
Society.
CWS is talking to French company ATOS about bringing its £9m
outsourcing agreement with the former retail society to an end.
CWS, a leading player in the co-operative movement, believes it
will make substantial savings by transferring the CRS mainframe
systems to CWS' Manchester-based midrange systems.
"We see midrange as the way to go. The CRS mainframe had costs
attached, which would obviously be of benefit to remove," said
general manager Keith Brydon.
The move is part of a programme to integrate the two retail
groups' IT systems by the end of the year.
The biggest challenge will be moving the CWS and the CRS stores
to a common set of product codes, essential to allow work on moving
the CRS systems over to CWS hardware to begin. "We have a long
tortuous path to go along," said Brydon.
CWS also plans to upgrade the till systems in the 460 former CRS
stores to ICL's GlobalStore software. This will add facilities like
cash management and automated ordering currently available in the
CWS tills that run ICL's ISS400 software.
"We are trying to make sure the capability of both systems is
virtually identical but that obviously gives us a problem of
duplicated development further down track. Everything we develop in
the CWS system has to be developed on GlobalStore," said
Brydon.
CWS and CRS systems
CWS hardware
HP Unix Servers running
- Central trading systems (Oracle)
AS/400 running outsourced to Syan running
Running
ICL Unix Servers running
- Stores systems based on Vision/ISS300
Datawarehouse Systems
- Teradata/NCR and business objects
CRS Hardware: Outsourced to ATOS
VME Mainframe running:
AS/400 running
Supplies system