$100 Million Amount invested: $100M Organization: Retail chain Original Plans: To replace central mainframe with distributed Unix/NT client/server solution to lower costs and improve profitability through improved stock management. The core of the application was to be a fully distributed database available to all locations online so that customer service could be improved. Overnight queries on sales could be made by marketing utilizing the new database. Unanticipated problems: Staff querying stock levels at other locations to meet immediate sales requirements of on site customers or telephone queries effectively 'locked out' local staff from accessing the database to handle on site customers. The overhead incurred by locking records, making 'phantom' allocations and then backing them out of the system was incredible, and response times often deteriorated to in excess of one minute. A doubling of the original capacity made no impact whatsoever and the opinion of experts consulted was that 'no amount of money could resolve the problem with the current level of distributed database software'. Furthermore, there seemed little real likelihood of future enhancements fixing the problem. The actual sales process increased in time and customer satisfaction fell as customers could not get the sales attention they required. In addition, at each location expertise was required to handle the myriad of problems that occurred, which increased costs substantially. The marketing department found that queries were taking hours to process, and quite often one query would lock out another one. Project Status: The system has been modified to use a central database. Now each location is utilizing a server with their own stock records, which are updated at the central site as stock is received or sold. Queries on availability from other locations now receive a 1-2 second response and the time taken for the local sales process has been dramatically improved. All of the Unix servers have been removed from the various locations and the NT servers have been downgraded in some cases. However, at least one of the Unix servers was utilized in the new environment as an extract from the DB2 database is made available at the end of each day for the marketing department to use for their queries. A future move to network computers is expected to improve things further by providing more hardware throughout the stores for no increase in cost.