Case Studies
CBE and Ntirety Building Growth Quickly and at Good Value
Work 'n Gear gets in Gear for Expansion
Operating under the new positioning of "Work Wear with 'n Attitude," Weymouth, Mass.-based Work 'n Gear is undergoing a metamorphosis as it remodels existing stores and aggressively expands the chain from 65 to 200 stores. Work 'n Gear's IT group knew that its IT systems were already stressed and unable to keep up with existing workload. With each new store opening and anticipated sales increases at existing stores, Work 'n Gear knew that the IT system problems would get worse.
Work 'N Gear Considers Their Options
"We'll have 20 more stores by early next year and need an infrastructure that will grow with us," said Leo Goncaldes, Work 'N Gears director of IT. "We found that as the backend Interbase database system running on Linux grew so did the glitches. Performance degraded as well. We could not effectively analyze the business. We needed a more stable and scalable platform."
Work 'N Gear was very pleased with the information gleaned from the Celerant point-of-sales and inventory management retail applications they were already using and worked towards keeping them onboard.
Microsoft, CBE and Ntirety Brings High Value and Lower Ownership Costs
At this point, Microsoft called in CBE Technologies and the database experts from its Ntirety subsidiary to present a case for migrating to a Microsoft-centric SQL server solution. Work 'n Gear ultimately went with this solution because it has a better long-term value. It is quicker to deploy, and represents a less expensive total cost of ownership due to lower upfront and ongoing support costs.
In only four months and without business disruption, CBE and Ntirety completed Work 'n Gear's migration to Windows Server 2003 and SQL server! It included developing and deploying new Celerant software for Windows and SQL Server. The solution also provided end users benefit from the deployment of Office Professional 2003 and Microsoft Exchange Server.
With the newly reengineered environment, Work 'n Gear can now analyze critical business data in real time so that they can more quickly respond to changing business conditions. "Now end users can choose between canned and on-the-fly reports and get data back instantaneously," explained Goncaldes. "And we have more options available to us for new information systems capabilities, including e-commerce, customer relationship management, and inventory management applications utilizing hand-held devices."