Whole Foods Market, the nation’s largest retailer of natural and organic foods, is a great believer in empowering their employees and store teams to create value and improve efficiency. They recently partnered with Polycot to develop a fast, full featured dynamic web interface to back-end databases, allowing store personnel to change promotional pricing, authorize items from vendors, and quickly search for product information.

“Whole Foods Market needed to efficiently develop an easy to use interface to their region-wide BASS Central Information Exchange platform for their Team Members at individual stores. We decided on the combination of a custom developed perl program and the apache web server,” Polycot Lead Developer Jeff Kramer said. “Both tools are industry standards and are tuned for quick development. Since they could both be deployed on the same SCO server as BASS, there was no need for Whole Foods Market to invest in additional hardware and maintenance.”

According to the Host Systems Team Leader at Whole Foods Market, “We had a very specific vision for what we needed, from the user interface to the database interaction. Polycot worked with us to develop that vision into a fully functioning, reliable tool that we’ve now deployed in 5 of our 8 regions. Response from the stores has been very positive. The web interface is much easier to learn and use than the command-line terminal interface.”

Polycot sat in on design discussions from the start of the project, providing feedback on feature viability and time and cost estimates of various options. Once an initial feature set was decided upon, our developers profiled the database structure, and developed a quick working version of a web query for testing purposes. Once the functionality was locked in, Polycot developed a set of easily modifiable HTML templates for each page, separating markup from the actual code.

“It turned out that different regions had different requirements for the various variables in the system, as well as data used in migration from previous systems,” said Kramer. “We created a modular system so that these regions can customize their own software while still keeping a cohesive version-controlled codebase, so bug fixes can be quickly and efficiently distributed. By utilizing standardized perl database abstraction modules we created an application that can be hosted on nearly any server that has an Informix client. This gives Whole Foods Market the option of moving the application to a centrally hosted Sun Solaris platform, if their needs dictate it.”

Polycot worked with the Store Systems Team at Whole Foods to develop the application in iterations; pushing out features to the stores as they were developed. This allowed stores to gain functionality quickly, without having to wait for an entire application development process. It also allowed Whole Foods to budget for specific functionality.

Kramer concluded, “We’ve created a very useable, modular application. We can add specific functionality quickly, and the structure of the application makes roll-outs a snap. We can setup the entire platform, including the apache server, the Informix SDK, perl, the perl DBI, compiler, database tables and the application itself from scratch on a new system in under 5 hours. The web interface allows us to create and manage users over the web, and the application then records an audit trail for us so modifications can be tracked back to specific users.”

“Maintenance availability is an issue for us. If there’s a problem with the database or the application we need to be able to get support, and Polycot has been very responsive. If we need to, we can be on the phone and have someone working on a solution within minutes,” said Douglas Korte, Director of Whole Foods Market’s Technical Services Group. “They’ve always had a close working relationship with us.”

About Whole Foods Market

Whole Foods Market, a Fortune 500 company, opened its first store in Austin, Texas, in 1980. Since then, Whole Foods has grown to operate the country’s largest chain of natural foods supermarkets with 181 locations in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. You can read more about them at wholefoods.com.