Out To order flooring, bath fixtures, appliances and other items for customers, workers had to flip through paper catalogs and then enter special purchase orders into Home Depot's retail ordering system, Chambers said. Meanwhile, interior designers and project coordinators who supervise installations had to use file folders and pieces of paper to keep track of things, said Michelle Valvo, development team leader for the project-tracking application. Now, room measurements and installation schedules get entered into the tracking system. Products can be viewed and ordered directly from the new order-entry application. Mass. The application server software conforms to the Common Object Request Broker Architecture for distributed computing.
Plans call for the applications to be installed at all the existing design centers by year's end.
Chambers wouldn't disclose how much it cost to develop the software, but he said each application took about 50 man-months to finish. Home Depot was one of the first companies to make a big commitment to working with Java. Chambers said the company looked at packaged software for the new applications, such as calendaring systems that could track projects. They're selling what is essentially a service, not high-volume products. The first Expo center opened in 1991, but Chambers said Home Depot didn't begin planning the new applications until last summer while the showroom concept was refined at a handful of stores.