Morrisons

Morrisons is well known and liked in the north of England largely because of its discount structures. A good example of which is how it discounts meals like the Sunday lunch. If you purchase a joint of beef and a bag of carrots it will discount anything that goes with it like puddings, gravy, potatoes etc. Although a complicated discount structure, the northern housewife could see a real price advantage of purchasing at Morrisons and it is well liked.

When Morrisons bought out the Safeway chain it was criticised heavily by the stock market because no one thought it was capable of bringing its selling style to the south, to say nothing of poor expectations when it came to roll-out. How wrong they were.

The project to rebrand all 180 Safeway stores as Morrisons was more or less completed in less than a year but there could have been one fly in the ointment: Morrisons' complex discount structures (which are updated daily) and its retail systems (including stock control) are all handled by each store's own VAX. 10 years after the last VAX was made, where do you go to purchase 180 VAX systems? Well, you don’t. Morrisons and its partner, Toshiba Tech, went immediately to emulation - without doubt a very astute move as it meant the VAX was fully built and configured (cloned) at the distribution centre on a new server and shipped to the target store along with all the other materials a store redesign took.

The stock market still gives Morrisons a hard time but no one can argue just what a success it has been with all converted stores doing far better than they ever did before under the Safeway brand.

As a footnote to this story, it's also interesting to note that since the implementation in 2006, Morrisons haven't reported any VAX faults at all.

To discuss this case study, or for more information about how Swiftbase can help your company or organisation, please get in touch.