Retail Tech. Completes Monumental Project with Big Retail Payoff
The Associated Food Stores’ retail technology team recently completed a monumental and important task that offers many retail benefits. Over the last several years, the team has worked to transition all stores from RORC StorWin back office to BRdata’s back office.
Led by Cam Bradford, AFS programming supervisor, the group has spent time every weekend moving small groups of stores to the new software. Team members Debbi Coleman, Angie Harward, Cheryl Jones and Lisa Dickinson all played major roles in the transitions.
“Our StorWin BackOffice was antiquated and hadn’t been updated in years,” said Cam. “We needed to get the stores to a new back office that was supported and offered the features and functions that were needed and wanted.”
The benefits of the new system to retail are many. Cam cites drag-and-drop functionality as a favorite as it gives stores the ability to take a simple spreadsheet and use the drag-and-drop function to mass update/add/remove items from the store system. The system offers benefits to AFS as well as BRdata back office ties directly into BRdata HQ and has tight integration with RORC (the supermarket point-of-sale utilized by most of AFS’ membership).
“Scanning is a unique job, where each day different things must be done,” said Cam. Our training team worked with each store every day to help show store team members the new process to use in BRdata to maintain item/pricing information in the store. To prevent the team from traveling each week for years, not to mention doing most of this while dealing with COVID-19, all training was done remotely.”
In total, 278 stores were moved to the new offering. Information from StorWin (back office) and RORC (front end) had to be pulled, converted and loaded into BRdata.
“The AFS retail tech. team is second to none,” said Cam. “The project of moving all RORC StorWin stores over to BRdata was extensive. We knew going in, it was going to be a long process, especially as we could only convert as many stores each week as we had trainers available. The team has been amazing in working with the stores and each other to accomplish this goal. We’ve also had incredible support from both BRdata and RORC to tightly integrate the back office and lanes and help make things faster, easier and cleaner.”