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About the Project
The Atlanta KMA, a Division of The Kroger Co., operates 210 Kroger grocery stores in Alabama, Georgia and southern Tennessee.

The Kroger Co. uses its Computer Assisted Ordering (CAO) application to enable product ordering for a grocery store. Store personnel walk the aisles and scan the bar codes of sold-out items into the CAO application database. This Shelf Review process is critical to profitability: if the item isn't on the shelf, that sale is lost and potential cross-sells are lost as well.

The Atlanta KMA wanted an easy-to-use reporting system that could flag inefficient usage of the Kroger CAO application (i.e., poor or no Shelf Reviews in stores) and providing quick, but thorough, reporting of the CAO application data.

Obectives

• Create a browser-based reporting system that would detail grocery store items, inventory and out-of-stocks.
• Generate summary e-mails listing grocery stores that had not done a Shelf Review.
• Generate summary e-mails listing grocery stores that have Shelf Reviews containing less than 50 items.

Strategies
Working closely with lead Kroger Web Developer, Titus Jones, Mission Data designed and implemented a solution for extracting the necessary CAO data from each grocery store's CAO database, loading the results into a centralized data warehouse and building a browser-based, easy-to-use reporting and data mining application.

The CAO Plus application was design to report the following:

• Active Items with No Balance On Hand
• Inactive Items with Movement in the Past 28 Days
• Grocery Stores that have not Completed a Shelf Review
• Item Detail for Items on a Grocery Store's Shelf Review
• Items on Consecutive Shelf Reviews over a Span of Time
• Items on Consecutive Shelf Reviews the Same Day of the Week

Summary e-mail generation was designed to send the Grocery Stores that have not done a Shelf Review and Grocery Stores having less than 50 items on a Shelf Review reports at the time of data loading.

The data storage requirement was designed to handle a rolling 28 days worth of Kroger CAO application data and would store approximately 64 GB of data.

• Project Technologies
• Macromedia ColdFusion 5
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000
• Perl
• SQL and DBAccess
• Common UNIX Utilities

Results
After four weeks of planning and development, Mission Data launched the CAO Plus application during December 2001.

Since that time, the Atlanta KMA has realized approximately $500,000 of additional sales per week due to the ease of reporting and additional focus placed on Shelf Reviews and Kroger CAO application usage by the CAO Plus application.