Proffitt’s World System

Last Friday, Dr Bud Douglas of Proffitt’s Company gave us a nice seminar.

At first, Dr Douglas told us about the development of his company. The company develops very fast in recent years. Now the company has 238 stores, which locate in 24 states in US, comparing only 21 store in 1993.

Dr Douglas then presented the current environment of the system which has a close relation with IBM.

The main parts of the system include:

• Jackson Data center (JDC)
• Milwankee Data center
• Store location
• Herberger’s DB, main frame, etc.

All the parts are linked though LAN.

Dr Douglas then presented the vendor analysis (phase I). The main characteristic is the data warehouse in JDC, the ROLAP engine (information advantage) RS66000 SP, and data marts DB2/PE.

The phase II is the retail chain, which includes the SUPRA and its main frame, Retek system (Oracle DB, ROLAP engine), and Carson Pirie scott (IBM).

The phase III is the client parts, which include POS termination DB/store contr. in store location.

Dr Douglas then presented the enterprise integration architecture: retail integration layer (RIL), which includes financial application, store operation, and logistics & distribution.

Then Dr Douglas present the application architecture: shareable frameworks offering, which includes application software (ISU), core business process (IBM frame works), common business objects, and base server (NT, OS2, OS400, clients, JAVA, etc.).

At last, Dr Douglas presented highlights of frame work for business object composition and network outline of Proffitt’s world system.