Dicks Sporting Goods
Pricing Upload Project featuring C Sharp / iSeries
Dick's Sporting Goods, Inc. is a full-line sporting goods retailer that operates more than 230 stores in 33 states throughout the eastern half of the United States. The Company's typical store has the following in-store specialty shops: the Golf Pro Shop, the Footwear Center, the Sportsman's Lodge, and Total Sports, a seasonal sports area displaying sports equipment and athletic apparel associated with specific seasonal sports, such as hockey and baseball.
Business Challenge:
- Dick's had just invested in a new IBM iSeries platform and JDA software's Portfolio Merchandise Management System to replace a Unix based system they'd outgrown over five years of phenomenal growth.
- Dick's price management department utilizes a sophisticated price-analysis process based a robust data warehouse system to constantly analyze and adjust prices. Multiple buyers review the various product lines and submit spreadsheets of pending price adjustments. The pricing manager consolidates the spreadsheets and finalizes them for implementation.
- Dick's wanted to integrate their Excel-based pricing analysis process with their new merchandising system.
- Naturally, Dick's wanted to maintain their effective price analysis and adjustment process but also be able to port the data into their new merchandising software with minimal manual intervention. Therefore, they were reviewing alternatives for importing price adjustments to the JDA PMMS system.
Solutions:
- IAT had been working with Dick's for approximately nine months on a variety of iSeries training, conversion, and application development projects.
- Dick's had developed several C# asp.net bolt-on applications for the PMMS system and wanted to maintain consistency in their choice of technologies. The combination of IAT's iSeries and Microsoft.net development experience led Dick's to select IAT as the developer for the pricing project.
- Chris Moretti, Dick's Project Manager, worked with the IAT staff to draft a design specification which was approved by the project steering committee. The new system would be comprised of a web-based application which accepted an Excel spreadsheet upload, wrote data to the native PMMS pricing files, and initiated a native PMMS batch process. It also included a reporting component composed of native iSeries programs and a Windows service written in C#.net.
Customer Results:
- A powerful new browser-based application enables Dick's to integrate their sophisticated price analysis system and with their new JDA merchandising system.
- Dick's has maintained their commitment to state-of-the-art .net technology as their choice for any enhancements to the PMMS merchandising software.
- The new system even represents an improvement to the original price adjustment upload to the Unix system, as the pricing process now includes extensive pre-upload validation and post-upload reporting. Pricing managers can request a robust set of analytical reports that project the aggregate effect of price changes across their chain of stores.
