Success Story

Success on Sun

Imagine stepping into a large, seasonally changing "megastore" that specializes in every type of home decor item, all under one roof. You've just entered Garden Ridge. From thousands of silk and dried flowers to housewares, picture frames, pottery, seasonal items, party goods, and much more, the company that bills itself as "The Home Decor Marketplace" is literally a home decorator's dream come true.

What started in 1979 as a single store outside San Antonio, Texas is today a $250 million U.S. venture with 21 Garden Ridge stores operating in 10 states throughout the country. Because of the enormous volume of merchandise the company buys and sells each year, its need for a high performance data warehouse solution to track inventory and, ultimately, forecast buying trends, is a top priority.

"Managing Garden Ridge's broad assortment of merchandise requires technology that helps us serve our customers -- whatever their needs," says Mark Wozny, Garden Ridge's director of development, operations and technology. "To facilitate this, we have established an enterprise wide data warehouse and transaction processing system solution that allows all levels of merchandising personnel to stay abreast of a retail environment that can change on a daily basis."

At the heart of Garden Ridge's computing environment is a sophisticated network of servers and storage systems from Sun Microsystems. Specifically, three Sun Sun Enterprise servers, one SPARCcenter 2000E server and three SPARCstorage Array disk subsystems running the Solaris operating system form a powerful backbone for the company's Informix-based data warehouse, as well as the transaction system.

Using a revolutionary new approach to merchandising, 150 Garden Ridge employees including buyers, logistics and planning staff, replenishment coordinators and management access the data in the data warehouse via networked PCs. The information that is extracted from the data warehouse enables them to identify selling trends and create forecasting formulas that can be used to generate purchase orders based on years of stored data.

Business Outgrows Legacy System

The company had been running an IBM RS/6000 legacy system. However, as growth exploded, business needs changed and Wozny and the IS staff began the search for an open architecture enterprise system. According to Wozny, "The legacy system has always been a challenge for us to work with as it imposed limitations on the number of items we could have in inventory under a given description. And, because Garden Ridge purchases a tremendous volume of individual items at a time, it was fairly obvious that this system wouldn't suffice long term."

Additionally, because Garden Ridge's philosophy is to give customers what they want when they want it, the new system had to enable them to store, sort and use the inventory information to forecast buying trends. Ultimately, the company envisioned that the new system would provide buyers with the ability to generate purchase orders and plan delivery dates many months in advance.

A Sun/Informix Solution Fits the Bill

Additionally, Wozny states that Sun's customer services group has been a tremendous resource for the development team's ongoing questions. "The Sun systems engineers are always available, and are knowledgeable and straightforward about what's a good practice and what's not. We'll be an all-Sun shop once we pull the plug on the legacy system and we know that Sun will be there when we need to modify, improve and grow our computing environment."

With the hardware in place, the development team used FourGen CASE tools to write 4GL code to build the transaction system. As modified, FourGen not only offered the retail elements but also provided integrated financials and distribution center components. The application modules in the transaction system include the distribution center, purchasing, inventory control, accounts payable and general ledger -- basically everything necessary to run the business.

The transaction system does most of the work, collecting information on the day's business activity including sales files, store transfers and price changes. At the end of each day, this data is pulled from the transaction system to the data warehouse where it resides for future use to identify selling trends and create forecasts. Informix Online Dynamic Server is the database engine used to run all of Garden Ridge's applications, including the Sun-based transaction system and data warehouse.

Wozny and his development team used Informix's resources to implement the database, specifically in terms of designing and configuring the data warehouse to take advantage of the SPARCstorage Arrays. In fact, he states, the data warehouse design drove the requirements for the data warehouse server, dictating the necessary number of I/O's per second and spindles, as well as the need to partition the database by time over the array for optimal processing.

"We have configured the arrays to maximize performance access to the database. By partitioning the database by time, we are able to read a whole week's worth of data into memory which allows us to rapidly process the data," says Wozny. "The fibre channels on the SPARCstorage Array and the ability to read multiple spindles -- all while working in memory -- are a real benefit to us."

Finally, Wozny states that the relationship between the various vendors involved in the install was, "like a big family. Both Sun and Informix have all been a big help in getting this system off the ground. It would have been hard to do it without them."

Putting It All Together

The company's 63 gigabyte data warehouse, running on a SPARCcenter 2000E server with six processors and one and a half gigabytes of memory, uses the information from the transaction system to aid in tracking sales, inventory and orders. In terms of a business advantage, the Sun-based data warehouse has proved invaluable. "At any time, our company can track exactly how its doing, simply by accessing information stored in the data warehouse via an SQL query," says Wozny. "Whether its gauging the effectiveness of regional promotions, looking at the success of certain seasonal items, or seeing how well the company's performing compared to plan, it's all just a keystroke away. This level of detail and breadth of history was impossible with the legacy system."

Staying On Top

When implemented, The Buyer's Workbench will revolutionize the way purchasing is handled at Garden Ridge. Currently, buyers and assistant buyers analyze stacks of printed reports -- generated from data stored in the data warehouse -- that are then sent to a merchandise clerical person to key into the transaction system for an order to placed. This system is effective because of Garden Ridge's experienced buying staff, but it is still essentially educated guesswork, which the Buyer's Workbench hopes to eliminate.

Here's how it will work: a candle buyer accesses The Buyer's Workbench from a PC to initiate a query to the data warehouse. Say for instance, that the buyer would like to know how well blue candles sold the previous year, how well they sold according to plan, and how well they sold in various stores. The data warehouse summarizes, analyzes, sorts out information about the query and presents it back in a logical format. Now, rather than sorting through reports, the buyer selects or builds a forecasting model for the data on line, adjusts the number of stores to buy for in the coming year, looks ahead a selected number of months for planned delivery of the blue candles and, with the push of a button, generates purchase orders based on the information supplied by the query.

According to Wozny, none of this what-if forecasting would be possible without the new Sun-based transaction and data warehouse system. "We're doing what every retailer strives for, which is truly comprehending how things are sold in our stores and translating that to actual sales," says Wozny. "The price/performance of the Sun Ultra servers is phenomenal. And, the best part is that, as we continue to expand (five or six new stores are planned for calendar 1998) our Sun system can grow with us and help us provide customers with the products they want, when they want them, all at the right price. For us, that means good business."