A GROCERY CHAIN PERCHED FOR SUCCESS

Our client, Giant Eagle Inc. is a regional supermarket chain that has over $9BN in annual revenue, over 36,000 employees, and is ranked #44 on the 2019 Forbes America’s Largest Private Companys List. Giant Eagle operates more than 460 Giant Eagle, Market District and GetGo retail locations throughout Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland and Indiana. In addition to providing customers with high-quality foods and a great overall value, most Giant Eagle supermarkets feature convenience services like pharmacies, in-store banking and dry cleaning.

THE GIANT EAGLE CHALLENGE

For many years, Giant Eagle employed a mainframe-based, Order Management software system that managed all ordered for every store in the company for order placement and fulfillment. The system kept the stores stocked with product and so it was mission critical to the organization. The volume of products ordered by Giant Eagle stores exceeds 1M items per day. While the mainframe application supported the company for many years, the mainframe licensing costs along with software maintenance & licensing fees exceeded $1.5M per year. The company wanted to build their own custom Order Management system that would eliminate these costs while also allowing the company to add many new and innovative ways to automate store ordering for the stores in the company.

THE MARKROF SYSTEMS SOLUTION

Markrof Systems was hired to help build the new Giant Eagle Order Management system.

Software specialists from Markrof Systems along with members of the GIant Eagle Supply Chain software development team collaborated on the design, build, and implementation of the new Order Management system for the company. The solution used Kendo UI, Microsoft C#.NET w/MVC, & Entity Framework on the front-end with a back-end Oracle database. The resulting application was hailed as the “best and most intuitive internal application in-use today at Giant Eagle” by Giant Eagle users. The system not only handles the volume that the mainframe application did, it was able to handle triple the normal system volume during the COVID-19 pandemic and the company’s ordering capability hasn’t miss a beat since. The savings of over $1.5M per year are and will be realized every year since the new Order Management System went live in early 2020. And Giant Eagle’s software team can now easily build new and innovative features into the application at a fraction of the software maintenance & licensing fees being charged for the old system.