The packages of hot dogs aren't moving, and the stock boy isn't the only one taking note. A new data-warehouse architecture at grocery chain Hannaford Bros. Co. tracks the movement of hot dogs and other items, and soon will be able to do so on a daily and an hourly basis.
Hannaford, which runs 110 supermarkets on the East Coast under the Hannaford and Shop 'n Save names, earlier this year replaced the Informix Corp.-based SGI Origin 2000 running its decision-support-system application with an IBM Corp. RS/6000 SP and DB2. For now, the system collects weekly data--for inventory, merchandising trends and accounting purposes--on how hot dogs, for instance, sold during that time in its store in Saco, Maine. "Our plan to capture the movement of items in the stores multiple times each day was a major part of our decision" to go with the new platform, says Doug Roberts, manager of systems services for Hannaford, Scarborough, Maine. Hannaford was recently acquired by Delhaize America, the fifth-largest grocery retailer in the United States.
The biggest advantages of Hannaford's new data-warehouse architecture, as opposed to its old SGI Informix platform, are greatly increased speed and room for growth. With the old platform, it took 40 minutes to run a reconciliation report gleaned from the data warehouse; it takes about three to four minutes with the new one. But the response time for short reports is about the same, Roberts says. Unlike the old system, the new one doesn't crash when you request a report, he adds.
Hannaford chose the IBM SP, with the SSA (Serial Storage Architecture) technology, and DB2 mostly because the company already had in-house IBM expertise and it was planning to go DB2 on its mainframe anyway. The upgrade cost about $2.8 million, including consulting, and Hannaford had to add 100-Mbps Ethernet ports to its Cisco Systems switches for each of its eight SP nodes. Roberts says the company also runs Gigabit Ethernet to its IBM mainframe and to one of its SP nodes.
The SP's claim to fame is that you can expand on a linear basis instead of just adding more CPUs, says Lars Rost, account executive for Pioneer-Standard Electronics Enterprise Sales Group, the Cleveland-based systems and software distributor that built the new data-warehouse system for Hannaford. That has to do with the architecture's parallel processing. The old platform was geared more to low-end applications. "It had a bunch of CPUs using common memory," Rost says. "There comes a time when adding processors doesn't really give you much increase in performance." With the SP, however, each node has its own memory, so there's no performance penalty when you add resources, he says.
The biggest challenge for Hannaford was adjusting to the MMP (massively parallel processor) architecture on the IBM system, where each node on the SP not only gets its own memory space but runs its own logical OS and database. That was a big jump from the older system's single OS and database approach. "There are definitely hurdles in the design and administration of a system like that," Roberts says.
Aside from the daily item-level data, Hannaford also plans to add warehouse inventory information to the database. This will let other departments in the company use the application to see how products are selling in certain areas, so they can determine how to stock specific stores, Roberts says.
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