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One of the most productive uses of the Internet in food retailing is the portal - a secure gateway, or extranet, through which suppliers, brokers, carriers and retailers can share all manner of data.
Wal-Mart Stores was the first retailer to recognize the power of giving its suppliers a view into real-time store sales data via its famed Retail Link portal. Since then, numerous retailers and wholesalers have followed suit with portals of varying kinds. Supervalu's SVHarbor portal covers everything from promotion management to dock scheduling; Safeway employs a portal for the transmission and management of trade promotions; Unified Grocers has a retailer extranet and a vendor portal used for new items among other functions; Wakefern launched a new-item portal last year.
Drawing from existing efforts and adding some of its own innovations, Bozzuto's, a wholesaler based in Cheshire, Conn., that supplies about 1,000 retail customers in the Northeast, has rolled out a multi-faceted portal over the past four years called SCORE (Supply Chain Optimization & Retailer Efficiency).
SCORE encompasses about a dozen modules, including four key internally developed systems: Merlin (for retailers), VICI (for retailers and vendors), IESS (for transportation carriers) and Westwood (for vendors and brokers). Bozzuto's introduced Merlin in 2007, followed by VICI, while Westwood and IESS were launched over the past 10 months.
There are no fees for Merlin, IESS or Westwood, though "premium services" with fees are coming in the near future. VICI requires a service fee that was not disclosed.
Other modules in SCORE include Cognos business intelligence, news maintenance, image database, daily reports, Java application security (JAS) and routes on the road (GPS).
Overall, SCORE represents a single source of real-time business data for all of its users, including Bozzuto's employees - everyone "from the CEO to the yard jockey," said John Keeley, the wholesaler's vice president of business information technologies. "Everyone's looking at the same sheet of music, and we're all communicating a lot better, which enhances efficiencies."
"It's a one-stop shop," said Rick Clark, Bozzuto's vice president of logistics and transportation. "You can find out whatever information you need to know by going to one platform."
"This is the "Google' of Bozzuto's," said Gail Handley, Bozzuto's vice president of customer service. "You ask a question,...