Food Lion licenses ADC's InterScale System; InterScale allows supermarket chain to change price, item and label information centrally to scales throughout its 1,200-store system
Food Lion becomes the latest chain to invest in InterScale, which uses a company's existing network to transmit future-dated item, price and label information to scales and barcode label printers in all perishables departments. The InterScale system works with all scales regardless of manufacturer and is relied upon by more than 60 supermarket companies and 3,000 individual stores nationwide and in seven countries.
"Food Lion's dedication and involvement with the InterScale software implementation has helped make this project a success on many levels," said Steve Loveridge, president of ADC. "Food Lion has the ideal retail environment to speed implementation, which has already resulted in a tangible return on investment. As with all of our relationships, ADC is focused on helping Food Lion gain bottom line results in their fresh food operations."
InterScale hosts accurate pricing, ingredient, label format and graphics data from a single source to supermarket scales and bar code label printers. Production data can be gathered from the scales in the same fashion.
"Accuracy and the ability to respond quickly to changing market conditions are as important to profitability as the avoidance of errors," Loveridge said. "InterScale allows management to react to market changes by quickly changing prices at scales throughout the system, avoiding loss of profit caused by prices that are too low or loss of customers because prices are too high."
Sales and special product promotions can also be managed with the InterScale system: Prices on any item can be lowered at a pre-determined time system-wide, then automatically raised at the end of the promotion.
With InterScale handling scales management system-wide, in-store personnel don't have to be involved.
"Updates are automatic, and that means that intervention by in-store personnel is unnecessary," Loveridge said. "That translates into a measurable reduction in in-store labor costs, another significant saving."
When InterScale orders a price change, confirmations are automatically sent back to the host from each scale. If a problem should occur, an e-mail can be automatically dispatched to the help desk.
InterScale's efficiencies and its ability to communicate with different brands and models of scales were a good fit with Food Lion's needs, according to Tom Weimer, store systems applications development manager for Food Lion.
"We needed to gather data from our scales for a number of purposes, but we found we didn't have an adequate method for comparing all that data," Weimer said. "The system we were using was a home-grown communications system that was outdated and very limited.
"We could see a great future need for two-way communication, so we started looking for a vendor that could fill our current needs as well as the needs we thought we might have five years down the road."
"We chose InterScale because of its flexibility and its ability to communicate with different devices," Weimer said. "We have a mixture of scales in 1,200 stores and InterScale offers us the ability to communicate with all of them without having to modify them or change them in any way."
According to Loveridge, InterScale can run in the stores either on the customer's ISP or through an ADC-provided server box called an iScale™. The flow of data is "scale-neutral," he said – InterScale works with all brands and types of scales. This gives supermarket chains broad latitude in terms of the hardware and weighing/labeling systems they can buy. They also have a high degree of influence on the continuing development of the InterScale system and its peripheral products.
InterScale has spawned a series of other related ADC products. They include the iScale servers, a range of rack-mounted or wireless "black boxes" that manage the in-store scales without the need to implement software on the client's ISP; NutriGen software to accurately generate ingredients and nutrition fact labeling from recipes; and P-Cubed, a predictive "fortune-telling" software that provides revolutionary fresh-food inventory and production management.
About ADC, Inc.:
Founded in 1989, Tampa-based ADC, Inc. specializes in the development of data management and communications solutions for the supermarket industry. The company's InterScale software suite is a global technology leader in the management of supermarket bar code printing scales. Its revolutionary web-centric, embedded iScale server hardware carries InterScale software into the store, enabling a plug-and-go scales management implementation. ADC continues to build on the InterScale synergies, developing perishable management systems that translate InterScale raw production data into meaningful management information both in the store and at corporate, and by exploring ways to use its web-based, distributed device management architecture with wireless hand-held user interfaces in other application areas.
About Food Lion:
Food Lion LLC., is a subsidiary of Delhaize America, the U.S. division of Brussels-based Delhaize Group (NYSE: DEG). Food Lion operates more than 1,220 stores and employs 86,000 associates, delivering "Extra Low Prices" and service to its customers, in 11 Southeast and Mid-Atlantic states. Food Lion stores offer more than 24,000 different products.
ADC, Inc. (Applied Data Communications Inc.), 6011 Benjamin Road Suite 107, Tampa, FL 33624. Tel: 813-849-1818 ; Fax: 813-849-1823.