The Challenge

C&S delivers over 140,000 food and non-food items from more than 50 locations in the United States and operates over 18 million square feet of storage space. Its customers include Stop & Shop, Giant of Carlisle, Giant of Landover, BI-LO/Winn-Dixie, Safeway, and Target. As C&S continued to scale and grow, it realized that its warehouse data was siloed and disintegrated, and as a result, this was slowing down distribution efficiency and impeding innovation.

The company needed to find a way to consolidate and respond to that data, which stemmed from numerous points across the warehouse operation. All of which needed to be done in real-time to improve efficiencies and help pinpoint and address problem areas in its warehouse operations. The subsequent performance enhancements would create a more seamless experience for its vendors and their end customers.

C&S needed its data consolidated into a real-time mobile app to increase warehouse efficiency. The app not only reads data but also allows users to communicate interactively and in real-time with data. “We wanted the mobile app to enable users to collaborate in real-time, adding notes as data was streaming from different endpoints into the application and writing notes back to the database to improve warehouse selection and time management,” said Salil Sinha, Vice President, IT Systems, C&S Wholesale Grocers.

The warehouses operate around the clock, so C&S needed a trusted partner who could provide a reliable, always-on solution that could help them consolidate all previously disjointed data points. and show all those moving parts on their mobile platform in real-time by warehouse managers, supervisors, and vice presidents. “We needed an application that was entirely reliable and not vulnerable to unplanned outages because our warehouses are pretty much 24/7… the data integrity, reliability, availability, and speed were the main reasons we went with the DataStax solution,” said Sinha.

The Solution

C&S previously had to manage and consolidate its data, so they needed the right partner to manage its enhanced platform. The platform had to capture millions of records in seconds and provide a real-time view of all the working parts. The real-time view of the manufacturing operation consisted of how items move through the warehouse and to which locations.

After vetting other solution providers, including Oracle, Hadoop, and Postgres, C&S chose DataStax Enterprise for its superior ability to compile the rapidly changing and disparate data and display it quickly on the mobile app. DataStax also seamlessly integrated with other technologies at play, including WSO2 for identity management, Wildfly for the web services, and Kony for mobile applications. DataStax Enterprise, a unified hybrid cloud database including search and analytics, allows enterprises to meet their personalized, always-on, real-time, distributed and scalable application requirements.

The Results with DataStax

By leveraging DataStax’s enterprise solution, C&S Wholesale has been able to get what it needs: an always-on holistic view of all warehouse operations. All in one place, DSE pulls together all of the existing disparate information from multiple sources made available for users in a real-time mobile view. The new platform is already helping C&S achieve remarkable efficiency, reading thousands of transactions per second per node and writing back almost as many simultaneously. Over 300 users are currently using the platform, which can process about 280,000 records roughly in five minutes. Over the next five years, C&S Wholesale projects that its direct return on investment from implementing DataStax Enterprise will equate to multi-millions in dollars.

What's Next

Given the immediate results C&S Wholesale Grocers has already realized using DataStax, the next step is to expand the mobile application’s use to all 45-plus of its warehouses. Furthermore, once this is complete, C&S will tap DataStax to help beyond the warehouses: “We want to continue using DataStax for the second phase of this project where we move beyond just warehouse information, to migrating data sets from our entire supply chain to be in one place,” said Kiran Killamsetty, Director of IT, C&S Wholesale Grocers. “This will enable our data lake for enterprise analytics and reporting needs.”