Retail Case Study

Digital Transformation Success Story

One major retail chain that we’ve worked with is a staple American discount retailer specializing in apparel and home furnishings. It is the second-largest discount retailer in the US with more than 1,200 locations across the country, operating four large distribution centers in California, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.

Because they utilized a legacy system called Oracle RDM (Retail Distribution Management), PITSS was able to offer our specialized expertise.

Workflow Efficiency

The character-based user interface was too difficult for workers to read and navigate.

Maintenance Risk

May not be able to find skilled Oracle Forms devs who are familiar with the old framework.

Handheld Risk

Needed to limit cost by keeping their aging hand-held devices but run a modernized.

Hardware Risk

Chance for lost investment and operational breakdown at any time.

Security Risk

Needed to follow modern security practices for collecting and managing data.

What was their challenge?

Managing product and moving inventory between these massive distribution centers and their many retail locations is a big endeavor. It requires hundreds of workers staying informed and managed in their various workflows to distribute their inventory to their correct destinations.

The application that our client used for this distribution management was developed from an older application suite owned by Oracle called Oracle RDM (Retail Distribution Management).

As a result, our retail client invested years of time and capital into customizing and maintaining their application to streamline their various business processes and making these applications work on their associated hand-held and machine-mounted devices which ran it.

The client needed a quick, cost-effective way to modernize one of their most important business applications to prevent eventual losses. That’s where PITSS came in.

How Did PITSS Help?

Relying our modernization process and previous expertise with Oracle RDM application projects, we recommended that migrating the retail distribution app from Forms to ADF.

Being a Java EE framework, the retail client can maintain their development team easily, compared to Oracle Forms. This technology would best answer the company’s challenges, while still retaining the company’s investments.

Our in-house consultants, having worked in similar environments, streamlined the migration process from Forms to ADF, extracted and reused the existing business logic using our software PITSS.CON. In this way, we were able to keep costs lower and project times shorter than our competitors.

We knew how ADF best worked—our updated architecture can now support thousands of concurrent end users. A different way of using ADF, had the client gone with a less experienced team, could have resulted in faulty user experience, performance issues, and an increased risk of project failure. We circumvented these problems altogether with our in-house knowledge and years of expertise.

The Results

Distribution employees now have an application with a visual user interface, allowing them to complete work faster and more accurately, without having to switch out existing hardware.

PITSS saved our retail client development time, preserved their technology investment, and produced a high quality, updated product that works well and solves some of their business challenges.

Become a success story.