Scolari’s Food and Drug Saves Over $1 Million Using Visual LANSA Accelerator

BLOOMFIELD, NJ – June 9, 2005 – June 9, 2005 – Scolari's Food and Drug Company, a Nevada-based grocery store chain, recently went live with a new ERP system built using Surround Technologies' Envision Visual LANSA Accelerator.

By building their system from scratch using the Envision Visual LANSA (VL) Accelerator, Scolari’s was able to realize an extraordinary savings in cost and time:

• $750,000 less expensive than off-the-shelf options
• $100,000 per year in savings on maintenance fees
• $250,000 per year in savings due to better processes
• Faster response to fix bugs and make enhancements

“We were looking outside to purchase software and couldn’t find one package that met our needs,” explained Rob Dornberger, Vice President of Information Technology for the grocery store chain, Scolari’s Food & Drug Co. “We would have had to purchase a retail system and warehouse system, and the cost of both together would have been $750,000 to $1 million more if we had purchased the software outside and then customized it (versus building it in-house from scratch).”

Surround Technologies’ VL Accelerator provides a framework for developing in Visual LANSA, according to the company’s vice president of product development, Derek Maciak. “Envision VL Accelerator helps you develop, maintain and enhance VL applications by giving you the architecture, the base pieces, to program in Visual LANSA. The components of Envision VL Accelerator include a code generator, templates, wizards, and fully built functional modules, such as search engines.”

Additionally, according to Maciak, because VL Accelerator provides professional-looking screen templates to be used out of the box, the developers no longer have to worry about fiddling around with the user interface. “It frees up the developers’ time to concentrate on their programming and making sure they are meeting their business needs,” he said. “The developers no longer have to worry about the look and feel of their application, since that is provided for them.”

Scolari’s programmers teamed up with Surround Technologies’ lead developer, Tommy Bardinas, to quickly churn out a quality application.

“I think it was pretty easy for our programmers to catch on and work with (the Accelerator tool),” Dornberger said. “It really helped using the VL Accelerator because they were able to do a lot more advanced programming more quickly. It was a lot simpler to use than just straight Visual LANSA.”

Dornberger recognizes the time and cost savings from having used Surround Technologies’ Accelerator tool. “This project would have taken us about 50% longer if we hadn’t had the Accelerator, (and) we wouldn’t have gotten the same results we did – the consistency, the professional look and feel, the searching functionality, and the navigation within the system,” he said.

Lastly, Dornberger is anticipating that his home-grown system will realize a sizable cost savings for his company in maintenance costs.

“Over time we may save $100,000 a year in maintenance we would have incurred if we had gone out and purchased a system,” he said. “And we are able to actually make changes ourselves and fix problems right away. I think we are going to see a 25% reduction in our supply costs through better management, … better tracking of inventory and better auditing capabilities.”

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