Trans World Entertainment performs as an On Demand Business

A specialty retailer of music, video and gaming products, Trans World Entertainment Corporation operates more than 800 retail locations in North America, with leading brands such as Coconuts Music & Movies, FYE and Wherehouse Music. The company also maintains several e-commerce sites, including fye.com, coconuts.com, wherehouse.com and secondspin.com.

Determined to grow its market share in an increasingly competitive environment, Trans World identified two key initiatives, which, if successfully executed, could help the company step up its performance. The first was to upgrade its existing IT infrastructure, streamlining it for efficiency and cost savings. The second was to better integrate point-of-sale and back-office applications—including automating a partially manual inventory tracking system—to enhance the company’s responsiveness to customer demand.

Trans World entertains new ideas for IT simplification and business process automation
With guidance from IBM Premier Business Partner Strategic Computer Solutions, Inc., Trans World’s IT team, led by Chief Information Officer John Hinkle, decided to simplify the company’s IT environment by consolidating three data centers into one and moving critical daily operations from multiple standalone servers, including a Sun Enterprise 4500 server, onto a single i570 system. “Consolidation allowed us to reduce our administrative overhead and redirect our IT personnel to projects that could better enhance our business,” says Hinkle.

The company now hosts its core supply chain, finance, merchandising and human resources applications on the single i570 system. Hinkle’s team took advantage of the advanced virtualization features of the IBM POWER5™ architecture to create six separate and very secure operating environments. Three logical partitions (LPARs) host Island Pacific, Infinium and Manhattan Associates distribution and financial software running on the IBM i5/OS® operating system. One LPAR hosts an i5/OS development environment and another runs an Oracle data warehouse on the IBM AIX 5L™ operating system, leveraging dynamic resource allocation to separate specific application processes from database extractions to help increase performance gains. In the near future, the IT team plans to use the sixth partition to support 10 Integrated xSeries® Servers that can replace multiple standalone servers for further IT consolidation, simplification and cost savings.

Data integration at point of sale enhances customer responsiveness and satisfaction
To provide better customer service, Trans World Entertainment also integrated its business applications on the i570 system with point-of-sale devices, allowing retail store employees to remotely post updates and corrections to their store inventories. Using the IBM WebSphere® Host Access Transformation Services (HATS) software to integrate these front- and back-office systems, Hinkle’s team was able to provide employees with access to current inventory information at the cash register. As a result, employees can offer customers better service by checking product availability and performing cross-store inventory lookups on the system.

“Before the integration, employees had to send e-mail to headquarters with the required adjustments—and then those entries were entered into the system by hand,” explains Hinkle. “Clearly it was difficult to accurately determine inventory status.” Now, via a browser, employees can access an i5/OS-based application to quickly enter an inventory adjustment and view the status of previously entered adjustments. “Our new system saves valuable time for both our employees and our customers and ultimately enhances our customers’ satisfaction,” says Hinkle.

Trans World dazzles with performance as an On Demand Business
In addition to enabling increased responsiveness and agility with the tighter integration of business processes, Trans World’s IT reengineering has yielded performance gains and cost savings. “We are realizing significant savings in hardware and operating system leasing and maintenance costs,” says Hinkle. “Those savings can be reinvested in growing our market presence.”

With the new i570 system, Hinkle’s team is logging dramatic improvements in application performance—which in turn translate into improved business performance. “For example, our sales and inventory summary has been reduced from 10 to 2.5 hours,” says Hinkle, “which means that that information is available—and actionable—almost 75 percent faster. Additionally, since the implementation, Hinkle estimates that Trans World has reduced backup time from eight hours to four, enabling its 8,500 employees to work with fewer interruptions and increasing employee productivity by making the system available an extra 10 to 12 hours per week.

“With the i570 system, Trans World delivers more up-to-date data in a third of the time, which is critical to a retailer’s success. Timely and accurate information is key to identifying trends or changes in the market and allowing us to respond to our customers’ needs,” Hinkle says.

Trans World predicts a hit with IBM technologies
Moving forward, Trans World is exploring the deployment of several innovative technologies on the new i570 system, including using IBM WebSphere Portal to serve applications to its employees. The IT team also has plans for further consolidation, targeting 10 additional servers for replacement with IBM Integrated xSeries Servers in addition to migrating more daily operations to the i570 system. “It seems our possibilities with the i570 system are endless,” says Hinkle. “System i5—a tightly integrated system that includes hardware, middleware, storage and security—can run the i5/OS, Microsoft® Windows® (via Integrated xSeries Adapters or Integrated xSeries Servers), Linux® and AIX 5L operating systems simultaneously. This system allows us to consolidate and simplify while giving us maximum business resilience and flexibility.”

Hinkle is confident that Trans World is now ready to pursue aggressive growth, adding new stores without having to reevaluate its IT solution for a few years. “The scalability of the new system will allow us to grow our business easily,” says Hinkle. “We believe that the i570 system can handle future expansions and seasonal spikes in business. We’re in a good position now.”

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