ANKENY, Iowa -- One of the country's largest and arguably most conventional convenience-store chains is in the midst of a high-tech makeover, testing new software applications to bring its decision-making agility on par with its massive scale.
Getting up to speed with technology has been a four-year effort for Casey's General Stores Inc., a chain of 1,400-plus stores in nine Midwestern states. But the main work is now done, according to Brad Heyer, vice president of IT for Casey's. He told CSP Daily News that the focus today is on layering additional [image-nocss] applications that can make the chain a leaner, more competitive operation. [To read more about Casey's slow-but-steady development of key competitive advantages, watch for the October issue of CSP magazine.]
From my standpoint, the [technology] initiatives they've had you can see in the numbers, Adam Sindler, associate analyst at Morgan Keegan, Memphis, Tenn., told CSP Daily News. Earnings were choppy for several years prior to their investment in technology. In the past two years, it's been more consistent and [the company has seen] significant growth in gross margins. A lot of that has been driven by POS data, with merchandising strong even with high gas prices.
In those initial walk-crawl days, they started small, rolling out the program to just two stores a week, Heyer recalled. That first year, they rolled the automation out to 100 stores. The pace built to where they were doing 12-14 stores a week, bringing 375 stores on line the next year and 475 after that. The company officially completed the upgrade in December 2005, with all stores being connected electronically via a satellite-based wide-area network (WAN).
The actual process began with scanning only the beer and soda categories. As the company became accustomed to the process, they moved on to grocery and other areas. As the scanning information became available, we then had to define new ways to get the information to the people who needed it, everyone from people at the stores to corporate.
About two years ago, they added a software solution that allowed them to load sales and cost information from stores daily, which gave them the ability to slice and dice data, Heyer said.
Eventually, they added a handheld device from Plano, Texas-based Retalix that allowed for the scanning of inventory coming into the store. Today, the company is testing a demand analytics tool that will help the chain reorder based on a number of store-derived data elements.
But the key to the entire process was the infrastructure Ankeny. Iowa-based Casey's began building in 2002. Heyer said that foundation now gives them room to grow. Once the backbone infrastructure is in place, you can more readily install [new applications], he said.
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