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Alacrity revitalises Worldwide Chain Stores' aging technology stack

Alacrity plays a significant role in the development and architecture of WCS's next generation technology platform capable of automating and managing complex omni-channel supply chain operations.


Cape Town, 07 Jun 2017

Worldwide Chain Stores (WCS) is an internationally recognised provider of software solutions and services, dedicated to improving the performance and profitability of an organisation's supply chain. Specialising in warehouse management, procurement and labour management solutions, WCS has an enviable history in providing world-class solutions to large organisations in North America, Europe and Africa over a 45-year period.

The Challenge:

Fact sheet
Solution: CSnx
Industry: Provider of software solutions
Provider: Alacrity
User: Worldwide Chain Stores

WCS's 2nd generation Warehouse Management Solution, although excellent and valued by clients around the world, was based on legacy technology. This presented a challenge to the long-term sustainability of the business, as unmaintainable technology would eventually lead to WCS's clients moving off the solution in favour of competitor's platforms.

The technology behind this solution would need to be updated and the system redesigned in order to meet the high standards of performance and stability to which WCS's customers had come to expect and rely on.

WCS started investment on the 3rd generation offering called CSnx. It was now critical to ensure that CSnx would meet its existing customers' need for a modern technology stack with rich functional capacity offering superior value. In order to achieve this, WCS required a highly skilled and knowledgeable development team, experienced in the latest technology.

"It was vital that we invested in access to the right skills, expertise and experience," says Joshila Makan, CEO of Worldwide Chain Stores.

Owing to the high costs and shortage of resources in the United Kingdom, WCS decided to partner with Alacrity Technologies South Africa, as they could offer high quality development at a lower cost. In addition to these benefits, outsourcing the development to Alacrity ensured that WCS would not be left with an excess of staff once the majority of the workload was completed.

The Technology Solution:

In 2014, Alacrity signed a long-term outsourcing agreement with WCS to become their development partner, thereby providing technology direction, enterprise and solution architecture services, as well as a full service set across the entire systems development life cycle (SDLC) for WCS's warehouse management and procurement solutions.

The first priority was for Alacrity to port the CSnx application from an outdated IBM based EJB2/ Struts solution, which could only run on DB2 and IBM WebSphere, to an open stack. The new stack used the most up-to-date Java standard (JPA2) for database access. CSnx could now be configured to use either OpenJPA or Hibernate as JPA implementations, thereby enabling customers to configure CSnx using their choice of database without any code changes. Various features of the Spring Ecosystem were utilised for the middle tier of the application to cater for aspects such as security, data access, integration etc.

Additionally, Apache CXF was used to create all the REST and Web services, and all reporting was done via Jasper Reports. The user interface was built using Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and SmartGWT.

The new open stack allowed for CSnx to be deployed on various databases and various application servers with no change to the code. It has since been deployed on IBM WebSphere, Apache Tomcat, Oracle Weblogic and Wildfly (ex-JBoss), as well as virtual machine clusters on Google Cloud and small single servers.

The end result has been a robust, stable, high performing application that should be successful even through the most stringent international architectural audits, and has allowed WCS to offer CSnx to a variety of clients, ranging from small businesses to large enterprises. The system is easily maintainable; thereby significantly reducing cost and turnaround time for changes needed for specific implementations or roadmap related enhancements. This new system will ensure long-term sustainability for WCS, and enhance the potential to increase market share for their CSnx product.

"The Alacrity Team has integrated well with the WCS UK and US Teams, and have become a critical component of our product development," adds Makan. "We appreciate the amount of effort and hard work the team has put in so far, evidenced by the tremendous results achieved over the last few months. WCS could have not done it without Alacrity."

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Editorial contacts

Robyn Nieuwstadt
Alacrity
(+27) 21 486 8800