Finlay Fine Jewelry
UC4 Helps Finlay Fine Jewelry Shine by Automating High-Volume Point-of-Sale Uploads
"With UC4, we can confidently handle thousands of files in a finite amount of time."
Jim Giantomenico, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Finlay
Customer Snapshot
Company: Finlay Fine Jewelry (operated by Finlay
Enterprises, Inc.)
Business/Industry: Retail
Company Headquarters: New York, New York City, USA
Presence: 687 locations
Webpage: www.finlayenterprises.com
The Company
Finlay is one of the leading retailers of fine jewelry and the largest operator of leased fine jewelry departments in department stores in the United States. The Company operates departments in major department stores for retailers such as Federated Department Stores, the Carson Pirie Scott and Parisians divisions of Saks Incorporated, and Belks.
The Challenge
It's a common IT scenario in the retail industry – multiple stores across the country sending multiple point-of-sale (POS) uploads to headquarters. What makes Finlay Fine Jewelry Corporation different is their definition of multiple.
Finlay is one of the leading retailers of fine jewelry in the United States and the largest operator of leased fine jewelry departments in major department stores for retailers such as Federated Department Stores, Saks Inc., and Belk's.
The company generates over US$900 million in sales from its 6,500 employees in over 950 locations. These locations are divided among 16 host store groups located in 44 states across the country. After Finlay's multi-million dollar investment in several retail e-business solutions from Retek, Inc., they discovered they needed help automating their batch processes.
"We realized early on in the Retek implementation process that we needed to acquire a premium job scheduling package that could handle our volume of data and save us time – which would in turn save us money", said Jim Giantomenico, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Finlay. "Between our Retek modules, our warehouse management and distribution packages and several custom applications, proven experience in application integration across platforms and operating systems was a must."
The Solution
A Retek strategic partner and enterprise job scheduling leader, the UC4 platform stepped in to help the jewelry giant. The UC4 Enterprise Job Scheduler now acts as a central hub for Finlay's entire IT system, controlling the scheduling, distribution and execution of batch processes for their enterprise-wide applications.
"Standard schedulers can perform limited grouping of data, but due to the volume of files that needed to be processed by Finlay, they needed a powerful scheduler that could customize and group thousands of POS upload files", said Krishna Vallapareddy, Implementation Engineer for UC4 Software. "For example, most schedulers would only be able to run point-of-sale data from each retail outlet one at a time. With over 1,000 outlets, that would be too time consuming and would present a major bottleneck in Finlay's network."
Utilizing the UC4 platform unique approach to job scheduling, Finlay has defined a logical interface group for each of its 26 host-store groups to hold the POS data from each individual store. If these groups were processed without the UC4 platform powerful queuing mechanism the massive amount of data would quickly bring Finlay's IT systems to a grinding halt. Because the UC4 platform is able to order and queue the appropriate jobs, they are able to fully utilize their given resources.
"With the UC4 platform , we can confidently handle thousands of files in a finite amount of time", said Giantomenico. "Not only have we removed the complexity surrounding our POS uploads, but we've saved time and resources by eliminating previously manually controlled processes."
The UC4 platform also provides an enhancement to Retek's restart and recover functionality by defining variables that apply to Finlay's specific needs of recovering errant processes. These variables can include dynamic values drawn from a database or job status codes returned from completed processes. Once defined, the variables can be automatically passed to any Retek module through the UC4 platform. If a failure code from a previous job is encountered, the Retek process can be restarted or an operator can be notified so the corrupt data does not enter the database.
"Without a powerful scheduler like the UC4 platform, I would need three times my current staff and I'd still have to keep my fingers crossed that information was getting from point A to point B", said Giantomenico.
