Birthdays, a UK-based retailer of greeting cards and related products, has enhanced the speed of its warehouse management system (WMS) by migrating it from the company`s legacy system to InterSystems` Cach'e database technology running on a Linux platform.
Birthdays run its WMS from Chess Logistics at its Bury warehouse where storage and distribution of 4 000 products is managed.
"Cach'e has enabled Birthdays to enjoy the benefits of the latest technology while maintaining its investment in applications development," says Henry Adams, country manager at InterSystems South Africa. "Birthdays has been running the system for many years, adding its own features and tweaks over this time, and a completely new package would have required significant tailoring."
This latest development has considerably reduced order placement, retrieval and replacement times. Order upload times, which when run on the legacy system were around 40 minutes, are now under one minute. Picking list production has been reduced from 31 minutes to 21 seconds. Other benefits include savings in overtime costs and management time. Reports once produced after hours can now be produced during the working day.
Adams predicts that Birthdays has only just started to see the benefits of the new implementation. The implementation was undertaken just before the Christmas period, Birthdays` busiest time of year; it took only seven hours, with operations continuing immediately after the upgrade. This lost times was made up within the first 24 hours.
Many users of Cach'e, a post-relational database, report significant improvements in transaction speed.
All Cach'e data is stored in multidimensional arrays, which makes access fast by eliminating the processing overheads associated with relational technology.
"Using the new Cach'e database and platform has enabled Birthdays to dramatically reduce the lead time required to process key tasks such as auto-replenishment orders as well as deliver improved resilience and data accessibility," says Adams. "This proved invaluable during the busy season in the run up to Christmas and has opened the door to introducing more dynamic processes in the future."
Share
Editorial contacts