Selling products through its 60 wholly-owned supermarkets and 1,000 participating retailers in the Hessen and Thuringian regions of Germany, Edeka has grown into a 2.6 billion deutsche mark organization over the past two decades. Though guided by the principle of product value rather than packaging, even cooperatives must innovate and differentiate, or else risk being marginalized in the market. Equally important is the need to improve employee productivity and reduce operating costs to boost profitability. With the DB2 data warehouse, we're deriving tremendous business value from the data. We're able to make more logical decisions, influence the marketplace much better and improve our profitability.
Considerable money is spent on their handling, storage and disposal.
So, we need to understand the reasons for rejections and control them in order to reduce operating costs. Data on Edeka's supermarket operations is captured on a VSE-based transaction system and then updated nightly to the data warehouse to provide the most current information on inventory turnover, new orders and more. In the past, data was scattered over numerous VSAM-based file systems and printouts were made available to the analysts. Since the data itself was accessible only to Edeka's IT programmers, they had the responsibility of retrieving data for the business users, which left them little time to develop new, much needed applications. It also resulted in duplication of effort and data inconsistency.