Indeed. Yet in this competitive business with historically tight margins, Family Dollar's business and IT sides have come together to do a major revamp of the company's IT. This includes a portal project that delivers daily business intelligence (BI) data—including sales trends—to store managers using a lean communications pipe for data (64Kbps frame relay lines). Those store managers used to wait for paper reports via snail mail. Also on the revamp menu: Replacement of the point-of-sale system—the sacred cow that retail industry IT departments rarely advocate touching.

What's the secret to making an IT overhaul on this scale work? Alignment.

The changes began when IT and the business side crafted a vision of the company's "Store of the Future" and then designed the technology framework that would be necessary to support it. So far, IT's keys to successful execution have been tight partnerships with the business, strong executive support, a flexible consulting partner and a commitment to learning new IT skills as you go along, Jewett says.

Keep in mind, Family Dollar implementing a portal project isn’t revolutionary, says Paula Rosenblum, an analyst and managing partner with Retail Systems Research, noting that in discount retail segments like party supplies, where she worked, business intelligence portals were common seven years ago.

A Common Headache for Retailers

To be fair, no one company in Family Dollar's market segment stands out for being an IT guru, Rosenblum says, with the possible exception of Big Lots, which has done some innovative work with initial allocation of merchandise to stores (getting the right product to the right store in the first place, to avoid costly store-to-store product transfers that aren’t selling well in a particular locale), she says.

But what's intriguing about Family Dollar and its discount store peers is the stunning volume of data with which they grapple, she says. "These guys are mashing up some serious amounts of data," Rosenblum says, due to the sheer number of product SKUs in the stores. And due to the commodity nature of the products, "You need the ability to make intelligence out of it pretty quickly. You don't want to wait and see if a product will do better tomorrow."