Mark Pearson, IS director at Iceland Foods, is turning up the heat on a number of technology projects aimed at continuing the company’s revival.

When Iceland was part of the Big Food Group (BFG), along with Booker Cash & Carry and Woodward Foodservice, its fortunes declined – but now the UK’s leading frozen food supplier’s fortunes are improving and technology is helping stoke the recovery.

‘Three years ago we were trying to integrate the businesses, but in the past two years, since the Big Food Group sold Iceland, we have been disengaging services from the other businesses,’ says Pearson.

‘From an IT perspective, we are bringing the business back to form through cost reduction and focusing on creating a leaner meaner organisation.’

Pearson is not splashing cash on technology. Over the past two years, he says, costs have decreased by 55 per cent and the staff numbers in his department have halved. But money is available for sound investments.

‘The cost controls are tight, but we have invested in projects on the basis of a quick payback, reducing maintenance and costs and improving service,’ says Pearson.

And there have been plenty of opportunities. Iceland has put in place a 2.5Tb data warehouse, installed a managed desktop infrastructure and completed an ADSL network rollout.

With some technologies, Pearson has made decisions that go against sector trends, such as scaling back its online commerce operation.

‘We wanted to simplify the business, and the kind of consumer our home shopping proposition brought to the business – cash rich and time poor – was not our true Iceland customer, so we stopped it two years ago,’ he says.

‘Online shopping also meant we extended our range of products into areas we did not really want to go, over-complicating the business.’

But Iceland did decide to provide a home delivery service for customers spending more than £25, a service which integrates neatly with information in the company’s customer relationship management (CRM) operations.

‘Our home delivery service is a unique selling point,’ says Pearson. ‘The card is swiped at the till and the information fed into the data warehouse. The information is used by our marketing department to understand different buying patterns and help with direct mail analysis.’

Iceland uses business intelligence software from Business Objects to extract information from its data warehouse, while data mining capabilities have been developed in-house using Microsoft’s set of web application development technologies ASP.Net.

‘The old management information system (MIS) was not intuitive,’ says Pearson. ‘It relied on static information where users had to point and click to create graphs, for gaining intelligence on data such as sales trends.’

‘We have used ASP.Net technology to develop an MIS to help cut and dice information, so that buyers can look at product group information across an area, region or individual stores.’

Focusing on developers’ ASP.Net skills has paid dividends for several technology projects designed to help the business. One initiative is a cash reconciliation system for all 670 stores that tracks discrepancies and has improved cash loss figures.

Pearson says a plan-and-pay system for stores to improve budgeting for payroll is also under way.

‘Under the old system, stores had to plan hours worked by staff in advance of a working week, and this information was not integrated into time sheets and payroll, so there was double handling of information,’ he says.

‘With the new system, hours are planned and confirmed in the working week and automatically fed into time sheets and the centralised payroll system. Stores can budget more effectively as there is real-time feedback on managing planned hours versus the actual hours worked.’

Pearson also envisages quicker and bigger wins as more and more applications are developed using .Net.

‘The .Net environment is helping improve processes and systems, and as we go forward we will be able to reuse code for other projects,’ he says.

Sometimes, however, bespoke software needs to be changed and Pearson says the retailer is completely upgrading its JDA supply chain systems.

‘We had bespoked so much around the core packages that we were significantly behind on the upgrade path,’ he says.

‘It is a brave decision but we have to sort it out. Iceland will install the latest versions of JDA’s store and warehouse replenishment applications. When the upgrade is finished early next year, we will have a cleaner environment to support and manage, giving us an end-to-end view of stock from the shelf in the store and back into the supply chain.’

Other changes have also concentrated on enterprise-level applications. When Iceland was part of BFG, it used enterprise resource planning software from SAP, but Pearson says the company has now reversed that policy.

‘The SAP system might have been of benefit to BFG, but it is not necessary for Iceland. We have stuck to best of breed for enterprise resource planning,’ he says. ‘Apart from the JDA supply chain systems, we also use their merchandising systems and the rest we have developed in-house.’

Pearson is adamant that the IT department should work with the business and deliver projects that will bring real benefit – see box, above, but his pragmatism has been polished after some 25 years working in the retail sector.

So, while he is happy to explore radio frequency (RF) technologies in a pilot project to improve stock management processes, he is not jumping on the RFID bandwagon just yet.