Ckmarket

C&K Market Rings Up Business with Actian Open Source

Highlights

C&K Market knows what it means to be “open” for business. The well-known supermarket chain servicing Oregon and Northern California customers has grown in 20 years from three stores to 60, with Ingres supporting it all the way. The retailer’s recent migration to the open source version of the Ingres Database registers with C&K Market by giving the company access to the wealth of knowledge in the open source community and a low total cost of ownership. In addition, the scalability, 24x7 availability, and enterprise-strength applications help keep the store in check, with customers happy and returning to shop again and again.

Challenge

In the retail business, maintaining efficient cost control, inventory, and pricing are elemental to success. When analysts at C&K Market want to see a new perspective on pricing and inventory, such as how inventory turnover in a remodeled store compares to the turnover of merchandise in the store’s previous layout, they submit a request to the retailer’s four-person development team, who easily fulfills the request. When adding a new store, a new price zone, or a new set of products, data entry clerks simply update the company’s retail catalog to include pricing and descriptions for the new items. The efficient reporting and analysis of pricing and inventory – and effective control of costs – is all enabled through the Ingres Database, an enterprise open source database.

Alan Nidiffer, vice president of IT at C&K Market, explains, “We started on a small scale with Ingres. First, we developed an accounts payable system; in order to pay our vendors, we developed an application that would take the vendor invoices and put them in our system to generate payments. Then we built a payroll system, and several other systems followed. Today, we have a complete financial package we built in-house on an Ingres platform. We’ve continued to evolve and refine it over the years.”

C&K Market has been running Ingres on a VMS platform, which is being phased out. Facing the need to transition to a new platform, C&K Market decided to take the opportunity to adopt an open source database solution, to take advantage of improved efficiencies, scalability, and low total cost of ownership.

Solution

Using the Ingres ABF development tool, C&K Market created a wide range of mission-critical applications, such as inventory, financial, and human resources – all built on the Ingres Database. “We’ve always been an Ingres shop,” says Mike Swigert, application development manager at C&K Market. He notes that in the transition to open source, the company decided to stay with Ingres for several reasons. “We’ve been very happy with Ingres in the last 20-plus years. It’s very scalable and we rarely ever need to call in on a support issue. When we do, we always get good help to our questions.”

Nidiffer adds, “Ingres is very scalable. It has given us the ability to add more stores, so as our accounts payable system grew, we were able to grow with it.” C&K Market now uses Ingres as the central data source for mission-critical applications across its 60 stores.

In choosing to migrate to the Ingres enterprise open source database, C&K Market didn’t seriously consider alternative solutions. Transitioning to a traditional commercial database would be “hugely expensive,” Nidiffer says. “But we never really looked at it that closely because we’ve been very happy with Ingres. We have a long history of a good working relationship, so we haven’t had the need to look elsewhere.”

A wide variety of end users tap into the database, from manual data entry clerks to people at the stores maintaining pricing to corporate control pricing to payroll and financial analysts accessing information. Swigert says, “In our corporate office, about 80 people access the database on a near daily basis, for payroll, accounts payable, and other applications. We also have some access at store levels, where users can get into the pricing system that’s also built on Ingres –about 200 people at any given time.”

The Ingres development team is composed of four people who maintain the database, applications, and about 3,000 reports C&K Market has created. To maintain control of the whole reporting process, the development team responds to end-user requests for new reports and report modifications. Swigert notes, “Administration is one of those very powerful pieces to Ingres. It doesn’t take a lot of administration, and it’s simple to develop in.”

Results

In moving to the Ingres open source database, C&K Market expects to leverage the benefits of the open source model, including cost savings and integration with other open source applications, such as graphical reporting tools. Access to the open source development community will enhance C&K Market’s own development team, extending its development resources while enabling the four-person team to focus on requests from across the C&K Market chain of stores.

In recounting the benefits of the migration, Nidiffer says, “The biggest driver for us is the ease of transition. The transition to open source is minimal in terms of making changes and affecting our ability to continue to operate smoothly. That’s huge for us.” Swigert agrees. “There will be some programming work to change, such as system calls, lower-level functions, but it’s certainly minimal compared to a full-scale migration to a different platform,” he says.

As an example of the minimal transition involved, Nidiffer says, “We took over a pharmacy operation from a third party, which had a mix of applications – QuickBooks, and other financials – that made up their system. Within three months, the development team had migrated all of it to our Ingres environment, smoothly and with relatively no problems. We’re all very impressed with that.”