4-page Case Study - Posted 11/14/2008
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Wine Retailer Grows Business, Better Supports Stores with Optimized Infrastructure
Total Wine & More is “America’s Wine Superstore,” operating 54 stores in 11 states and carrying thousands of different wines, spirits, and beers. With the company’s success and growth has come a proliferation of servers in stores and at headquarters to support new business initiatives—and with those, an increase in technology management work. To relieve the IT staff of the need to manually manage servers, Total Wine took advantage of solutions in the Microsoft® System Center suite of solutions to automate server imaging, application and update deployment, server monitoring, and backup. With fewer technology management chores, Total Wine can grow its business and roll out new services. Store employees spend more time focusing on customers and accomplishing productive tasks thanks to more reliable systems, better backup management, and fewer local server problems.
Situation
Total Wine & More is the largest independent fine wine retailer in the United States and the only major wine company to operate in multiple states. Each of its stores carries approximately 8,000 types of wine, 2,000 types of spirits, and 1,000 different beers. Total Wine differentiates itself not only by its selection of beverages but also by its highly trained wine experts. The Potomac, Maryland–based company employs approximately 1,800 people, 175 of whom work in Potomac and the rest work in regional offices and the company’s 54 stores.
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System Center has really enabled us to be more proactive in the way we think about our business and freed up time for our staff to take on new projects that will move the business forward. |
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Todd Slan
Director of Technology, Total Wine & More |
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The beverage and alcohol market is highly regionalized, with laws governing the supply, distribution, and sale of alcoholic beverages varying by state and county. Few companies have been successful in navigating this maze of jurisdictional rules. Total Wine is the only beverage and alcohol chain store that operates in multiple states—and it owes this accomplishment to its use of technology to support business goals.
Total Wine has succeeded where others have failed by creating a custom suite of core business programs, including point-of-sale (POS), supply chain, distribution, and inventory management software. Every time the company rolls out a store in a new state, it simply modifies these custom applications—created using the Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 development system, the Microsoft .NET Framework, and Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 data management software—to accommodate the new regulations.
Installing this set of business applications on headquarters and store systems consumed more time as Total Wine grew. The company’s double-digit growth since its foundation in 1991 caused the IT infrastructure to multiply to the point where the IT staff was pulled away from strategic initiatives to address application deployment, software updating, server setup, and problem troubleshooting. “On one hand, our IT infrastructure has been critical to our ability to expand the business quickly; but at the same time, our fast-growing infrastructure began to require so much attention that it was an impediment to business growth,” explains Todd Slan, Director of Technology for Total Wine & More.
During the 1990s, Total Wine used desktop computers to run applications in stores. There were no servers, domains, or centralized management systems. The three-person IT staff collectively spent 350 nights a year on the road, traveling from store to store to manually install new software, upgrade software, and maintain hardware. “Patching software and rolling out servers took time away from strategizing growth and finding new ways to help our stores,” Slan says.
From 2002 to 2003, Total Wine replaced store desktop computers with servers and licensed Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 to help with application and update deployment. Still, rapid business growth led to a proliferation of 125 servers in five years—one in each store and the rest split between the main data center in Potomac and a secondary data center in Tucson, Arizona.
The IT staff spent significant time backing up business data. As data volumes grew, the company’s Veritas Backup Exec backup software could not perform a full backup in the allotted backup window. “Volume management became a big challenge and was a very manual process,” Slan says. “Our engineers spent hours every day analyzing backups to figure out where to put various data volumes so that all the backups would finish at the same time.”
Total Wine also wanted to minimize planned and unplanned downtime of store systems, which impacted store sales and staff productivity. “Upgrading a server or application often took key store functions offline, which impacted a store’s ability to ring up sales and answer customer questions,” Slan says. “We have an incredibly highly trained staff that really knows wine. We don’t want them troubleshooting computer problems.”
Without prompt update deployment and hardware maintenance, critical applications were often unreliable and led to frequent system failures. When store systems failed, staff had to leave customers and call the IT staff. One key store application, called POS Service, collects sales data from all store registers at the end of each business day and transmits it to a system in Potomac. If there’s a glitch in the register polling process, the store cannot ring up sales the following day, which creates problems for the sales, customer service, accounting, inventory, and ordering departments. The POS Service application failed in at least one store every few days due to register communication problems.
Solution
Slan knew that the company needed more sophisticated infrastructure management tools before it could grow further. Otherwise, the work required to roll out new store systems and maintain existing applications would overwhelm the IT staff’s ability to take on new initiatives. Because Total Wine already used Systems Management Server 2003, it decided to investigate other Microsoft infrastructure optimization solutions.
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The System Center solutions have made us a much more agile organization, because we can deploy a new store in a very efficient, standardized manner.… This efficiency has a huge impact on how fast we can grow. |
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Todd Slan
Director of Technology, Total Wine & More |
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In early 2007 with help from Microsoft Services, Total Wine deployed the beta version of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 e-mail messaging and collaboration software; Veritas Backup Exec did not support the program. Total Wine thus deployed System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 to back up its message stores. “Not only did System Center Data Protection Manager provide backup for Exchange Server 2007, but its volume management features instantly reduced our backup chores by several hours each day,” Slan says. “For the first time, we were also able to complete all our backups before the next business day.”
This success led Total Wine to hasten its investigation of solutions from Microsoft System Center. “We liked the capabilities of the individual Microsoft System Center programs, but we also liked the suite concept, which made a lot of sense to us—using an integrated set of Microsoft programs to monitor and manage mostly Microsoft-based workloads,” Slan says. “We also liked the suite licensing model that Microsoft offers. We’re moving into virtualization, and we’ll be able to extend our licensing efficiencies to virtual machines as well as physical servers.” Total Wine obtained a license for the Microsoft Server Management Suite Enterprise license, which bundles System Center Configuration Manager 2007, System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, System Center Operations Manager 2007, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 in one package.
Today, Total Wine uses System Center Configuration Manager 2007 to quickly and easily roll out new applications and software upgrades, including its suite of custom business applications, so it can get new stores operating quickly and applications upgraded immediately. It also uses System Center Configuration Manager 2007 to speed server replacements. For example, a store server recently failed, and the IT staff was able to reimage and replace the server within a day.
The company uses System Center Operations Manager 2007 to monitor all servers and applications, especially the POS Service application in stores. Total Wine wrote a small application based on the .NET Framework that works with System Center Operations Manager 2007 to monitor POS Service, ensure continuous operation, and automatically restart any failures. “To appreciate how important this service is to us, you have to understand our sales volumes,” Slan says. “We ring up an average of 2,500 transactions per day in our bigger stores. If we can’t capture every transaction for every store, we can’t give customers up-to-date information on our inventory or even ring up sales on the following day.” Total Wine also uses System Center Operations Manager 2007 to monitor Exchange Server 2007, System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, and SQL Server 2005.
On some of its servers, Total Wine recently deployed the Windows Server® 2008 operating system with Hyper-V™ virtualization technology to create and test virtual machines. Total Wine will deploy System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to deploy, tune, and manage its virtual machines. “Virtualization will save us a lot of rack space and management time,” Slan says. “We recently virtualized some older servers in minutes that we otherwise would have had to spend days replacing.” By late 2008, Total Wine will deploy Microsoft Forefront™ Security for Exchange Server and Forefront Client Security, which provide malware protection for Exchange Server and client computers, respectively.
Benefits
By optimizing the management of its IT infrastructure, Total Wine & More has been able to speed up hardware and software deployments and reduce technology management work, which facilitate the company’s rapid growth. With fewer technology interruptions, store staff is more productive and stores more profitable.
“Successful software deployment, backups, and system monitoring are critical to the functioning of the entire company,” says John Trone, Chief Information Officer for Total Wine & More. “The entire IT team at Total Wine and Microsoft Services deserve a lot of credit for such a quick and successful implementation.”
Greater Agility for Faster Growth
Total Wine benefits from the simpler IT management that comes from a unified, highly integrated collection of business and management programs designed to work together. The company also realizes cost benefits from having all these programs bundled with Server Management Suite Enterprise pricing.
“With System Center solutions, we can spend more time focusing on managing and growing our business,” Slan says. “We can now be more forward-thinking and proactive in how we approach our daily jobs; the IT staff spends less time in reactive mode and we’re able to take on a lot more projects that we never had the time to do.”
Robert DeSantos, Senior Systems Administrator for Total Wine & More, adds, “As an IT network administrator, I’m encouraged with the System Center suite of programs and its future. The integration of the different components continues to grow, and that helps in setup, deployment, maintenance, reporting, and trouble shooting.”
For example, with the time it’s reaped from more efficient management, the IT staff just wrote a new program that assists with inventory management and sales collection. The staff will use System Center Configuration Manager 2007 to automatically deploy this application to all stores in late 2008, saving weeks of travel time for the IT staff.
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Our stores have noticed that the reliability of their technology is much higher. They spend a lot less time with technology issues and more time managing their business. |
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Todd Slan
Director of Technology, Total Wine & More |
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Using solutions from System Center, Total Wine has cut the preparation for new-store openings from several weeks to several days. This includes everything from formatting hard drives and installing operating systems to installing the company’s custom business applications and getting updates to the right levels. “We spend less time doing the same process over and over again,” says Slan. Plus, Total Wine brings a higher level of control to the work. With System Center solutions, there’s no room for error, because images are standardized. “The System Center solutions have made us a much more agile organization, because we can deploy a new store in a very efficient, standardized manner,” Slan says. “Our staff can walk into a store anywhere and encounter the same IT infrastructure. This efficiency has a huge impact on how fast we can grow.”
Total Wine estimates that the use of System Center Operations Manager 2007 to monitor the POS Service application has eliminated dozens of help-desk calls each week from stores experiencing problems. Also, automated zero-touch software distribution eliminates the time the IT staff used to spend on the phone, walking employees through reboot procedures. The IT staff can now schedule software distributions and updates when it is least disruptive to the business, and those distributions have a much higher success rate.
“Now that we can automatically and remotely deploy new applications and updates and monitor servers, we spend about four nights a year per new store doing physical server setup and maybe two to three additional nights implementing special projects,” Slan says. “That’s about 60 days of travel time annually versus the 350 nights a year we used to spend on the road managing store servers.”
Higher Sales Staff Productivity
Total Wine also uses System Center Configuration Manager 2007 to ensure that all store devices stay up and running, reducing the likelihood that highly trained salespeople are spending valuable time searching for inventory or administering servers. The reduction in help-desk calls to Potomac results in more time for store personnel to spend with customers, which contributes to the company’s bottom line. “The automated monitoring of store technology makes that technology more reliable so that our store staff has more time to sell,” Slan says. “Across 54 stores, this equates to hundreds of hours annually in additional selling time. Higher store staff productivity directly impacts store profits.”
Better Data Protection
Using System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, Total Wine can completely back up business data before the next business day, something it could not do previously. The hours each day that engineers spent managing backup volumes, backup schedules, and tape libraries can now be spent helping stores and developing new services.
With System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, Total Wine can take snapshots of business data several times a day, which greatly simplifies file restores. “Since volume management is so easy, we can keep more backup data available, so we rarely have to go to tape to restore a file,” Slan says. “Instead, we can restore from disk, which is much faster. Our staff probably saves several hours a month in file restores. But more important is the timesaving for end users. They don’t have to spend hours recreating lost work.”
Improved Reliability and Availability
Total Wine has improved the reliability and availability of its technology infrastructure through the use of System Center solutions. The rapid, automated backup of data between its two data centers gives the company much better disaster preparedness. And the IT staff can be more proactive in detecting and repairing server problems through automated alerts. “While we may still experience problems, we can proactively correct them before the store manager notices them; that’s a huge win for us,” Slan says. “It’s even better when System Center Operations Manager 2007 automatically corrects a problem in the middle of the night, eliminating the need for the IT staff to do anything.”
Slan and his staff are pleased with their ability to provide much higher service levels to store staff. “Our stores have noticed that the reliability of their technology is much higher,” Slan says. “They spend a lot less time with technology issues and more time managing their business. They don’t want to think about technology; they want to think about wine. System Center has really enabled us to be more proactive in the way we think about our business and freed up time for our staff to take on new projects that will move the business forward.”
Improved Regulatory Compliance
Going forward, Total Wine sees its technology investment helping the business in other areas such as regulatory compliance. The company is a fully certified Level 2 Payment Card Industry (PCI) vendor, and PCI compliance is steadily becoming more complex. The PCI Security Standard is a set of requirements to ensure the safety of credit card data. “As PCI regulations stiffen, System Center will play a bigger role in helping us comply,” Slan says. “PCI regulations are dependent on the number of credit card transactions a company performs, and a high-volume outfit like ours has to meet stricter standards. Database change-management and audit logging becomes more complex, and we need to make sure we’re at the right compliance levels. System Center solutions will become a significant aspect of our compliance strategy.”
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx
Microsoft System Center
Microsoft System Center is a family of leading IT management solutions that helps you proactively plan, deploy, manage, and optimize your IT environment.
For more information about System Center solutions, go to:
www.microsoft.com/systemcenter
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Total Wine & More products and services, call (301) 795-1000 or visit the Web site at:
www.totalwine.com
