Warehouse system speeds scientific side of selling

By ADAM GIFFORD

The Warehouse has upgraded its data warehouse with a $6 million Teradata WorldMark 5300 system.

It will more than double processing power and give the data warehouse more than 4 terabytes of disk space.

Chief executive Greg Muir said the extra capacity would help the company to expand in Australia. The buying team from the Australian "Yellow Sheds" is in New Zealand learning how to use the system.

The Warehouse has used Teradata gear for more than five years.

"It took time to learn how to use a data warehouse and how to structure the data tables for it to work well," Muir said.

"Then the process becomes institutionalised. It is a slow and gradual payback, but I can't imagine us operating as an organisation now without it."

Chief information officer James Allison said the WorldMark 5300 host is at Unisys' Penrose data centre, with the Unisys Clearpath mainframe which runs The Warehouse's retail inventory system.

The data warehouse is known as Max, after its most widely used application, Merchandise Analysis Exceptions.

The key to Teradata equipment is the hardware and database architecture, which allows parallel processing of enormous amounts of data.

Allison said one of the first reports shifted to the data warehouse was a weekly performance analysis which took 12 hours to run on the mainframe.

"It took 40 minutes to run on Teradata - we went back to check the numbers added up."

Attached to the data warehouse are Sterling Douglas Group tools which handle product replenishment and merchandise planning.

"We use this to automatically reorder and replenish at source," Allison said.

"Buyers can use it to analyse what is selling and what is not, the metrics of the sale, how much stock is held and compare sales to budget."

He said that in the early days, buyers did not believe what the system was telling them. But they now happily used the Microstrategy front end tool to query the data warehouse.

Allison said retailing was still a mix of art and science.

"The art piece is still with the buyers. There is this place they go in Canton which is a kilometre square and six storeys high.

"There is a lot of intuition in that. Buyers will say 'I can move that'.

"We try not to drive that out because we would lose some of the excitement and the tradition of The Warehouse.

"What we are doing with the data warehouse is supplying the science bit. We are being a lot more scientific about getting stock holdings down.

"If we can reduce our burden in terms of the capital we have invested in stock, if we can improve supply chain efficiency so stuff is coming in when we need it to, if we can reduce our out-of-stocks so stuff is there when people want to buy it - all those things are helping us improve the bottom line."

The proof came last Christmas, when Allison said The Warehouse sold 20 per cent more toys even though it carried 15 per cent less stock.