Sainsbury's is working with the company behind its
Nectar card reward scheme, LMG, to develop an application to enable
the supermarket and its suppliers to find out how well products are
selling.
The application, called Self Serve, is due to go live in April
and will provide an
analytical reporting system based on the goods scanned at the
point of sale in every store across the UK. Up to 40 million
transactions will be recorded from the stores each day.
Garth Ralston, development and support manager at LMG, said the
software will provide Sainsbury's trading teams with the same
system and reports as Sainsbury's suppliers have.
Self Server has been written using Adobe Air, Adobe's newly
introduced rich internet application development tool, which was
launched on Monday.
LMG said it needed to create an application that was "visually
engaging and appealing to the end-user". Ralston said Self Serve
LMG used the SQL database feature in Adobe's Air to support the
application, which needs to process a large amount of data. LMG
also plans to use other Air features, including encryption,
notification and automated updates to the application.