Tesco's has enlisted the assistance of
Micro Focus (Newbury, England) to modernize and extend its inventory management systems. Rollout of the new system will start with Tesco's new data center in California when it launches its first U.S. store later this year. The upgrade will reportedly yield considerable savings for Tesco, which will be able to use existing servers and avoid investing in additional support for its international operations. The initiative is part of the company's strategic goal to create a common global operating model.
"Elements of our common operating model are already in place and benefiting some of our businesses," said Colin Cobain, group IT director at Tesco. "Micro Focus' modernization expertise is not only helping us maintain the momentum behind this strategic IT project, but is also playing a key role in the development of our United States presence. This project will help us meet our goal of opening our first store in 2007."
In February 2006, following extensive consumer research, Tesco announced plans to open stores in the United States that will be modeled on its Express concept, which currently operates in five countries with over 1,000 stores serving around eight million customers every week. Micro Focus will help Tesco to modernize and extend its unique continuous replenishment application to run on the latest IBM System p servers running AIX UNIX in addition to its IBM System z mainframe running z/OS. Micro Focus will create a port for the COBOL-based continuous replenishment application to AIX. This will allow Tesco to maintain a single source stream for both the mainframe and UNIX versions of the application, ensuring future enhancements to the UK-based mainframe application are rolled out seamlessly to all international countries on the existing IBM System p servers in a cost-effective manner. The extension to System p servers and Open CR solves a problem of providing right-sized processing power to countries like Turkey, where Tesco's data center in Izmir currently supports eight Turkish hypermarkets.
