Piggly Wiggly NC Installs Centralized Hosting System

KINSTON, N.C. - Food Farm, Inc., a consortium of independent food retailers under the Piggly Wiggly banner, yesterday began centrally hosting sales and pricing data for its 67 stores using new host software, and will soon begin installing new back office systems in each store.

The retailer is using Retail Boss Host software from Melville, N.Y.-based BRdata for setting retail and sales pricing and e-mailing price-change files to the stores, which are manually imported into the stores' current back-end systems.

"Standardizing the stores on Retail Boss Store system will automate the procedure at the store level," said Melissa Enzor, IT manager at Food Farm's corporate office. "All they'll have to do is execute the batches we send to have them automatically sent to the correct locations in the system. This will eliminate several steps in what our stores have to do, and free up staff for other tasks."

Plans are to start installing at the store level in January 2007, with a goal of 57 stores running BRdata by the first of July, which Enzor expects to make information exchange between stores and headquarters even more efficient. "Sending and receiving files to and from the stores is so much easier even without automation taking place yet at the store level," she says. "We can handle zone pricing easier to account for different vendors, the reporting gives us sales and movement history on every store, and the information we get gives us more accurate data driving our use of BRdata's Ad Planner module."

BRdata's Retail Boss suite of applications includes in-store solutions, a corporate host, financial applications, and frequent shopper programs, and interfaces to perishable scale systems.
X
This ad will auto-close in 10 seconds