2003 C.I.P.A. Winners
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Mark's Work Wearhouse Ltd.
Open Systems Are Alive and Growing in Retail!
Overview To implement a strategy of driving function rich portal technology (using open system components, Java and Linux) to stores over traditional Frame Relay and DSL circuits eliminating the need for in-store servers and reducing costs. Objectives The main objective was to replace the 10-year-old 'Green Screen' 5250 RPG based Point-of-Sale application that was running on old technology, which was no longer supported. Mark's chose to do this with an Open Systems based product, Retail Point of Service, from Retek as it wished to install the new system without the need for an in-store processor. At the same time Mark's decided to install the system running on a Linux operating system as it was a solid operating system capable of running mission critical applications. Mark's also wanted to do this while delivering function rich applications. Summary Description The system used at Mark's is IP based and requires no in-store server, yet it is fully capable of running in off-line mode. It is based on the following 4-tiered architecture. Presentation Layer - IP based cash registers, IBM SurePos 53X's, contain the User interface (UI) objects and are IP devices on the WAN. They also contain price files that are updated daily. Object Naming Layer - In the OO world this layer is invoked only when the IP device establishes communication connectivity at the start of each day. The naming layer looks to the application layer to determine which Service will be provided by a specific application server to the IP device while it is connected. For instance, Banking Service, Transaction Service etc. Application Layer - This is an N to 1 tier of application servers that have the identical image. As the naming layer rotates Service requests in a round-robin process the next available application service is connected to the IP device through the connection pool. Once the Service is assigned to the IP Device the connection to the Application Server is direct and the Naming Layer is not needed again until the device has to reconnect after a communication or application failure. Persistence Layer - As the application executes each retail transaction, the data is stored in the user's database in the persistence layer. All data is stored centrally and live and is mirrored! This eliminates the need to poll each store nightly and provides real-time transaction processing! Mark's have chosen to deploy the first three layers on Linux to further drive its operating costs down. The beauty of this application is in its architecture. Since it is completely open, it can be deployed on any infrastructure, using any database. Innovative Use of Technology In retail work is done on tight front-line contributions from stores and every dollar saved on the expense side goes directly to the bottom line. At the same time IT is striving to deliver function rich applications that leverage available technologies. How is this done cost effectively? Mark's feel that it has found the way to do this by leveraging web based portal products that are enabled by using open systems technologies. All the customer-facing applications are being developed in an Object Oriented fashion using Java. Mark's has also chosen to further reduce its licensing costs by deploying them on Linux. Retailers constantly refer to the 'Sales capture' portion of their business as 'Store and forward' as they are needed to store data on servers local to the store and then poll the information into their corporate systems nightly. With Marks' new Java POS deployment it has changed that paradigm to 'forward and store'. Now the data is forwarded in real-time using existing traditional telecommunications channels and stored 'live' in Marks' corporate database. The power is in the OO architecture of the application, which allows Mark's to extend object classes to customize the product without jeopardizing the core source code.
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