An industrial engineering study on the store's checkout lanes was IT's ally here: The study convinced Family Dollar's business and IT sides to reduce the number of checkout lanes in the company’s designs for its store of the future. "That allowed us to redirect capital to the portal," Jewett says, as did ripping out the previous back-room PCs running DOS that were made unnecessary by the new portal. In the process, stores got more merchandising space as well.

Pulling the Point-Of-Sale Plug

As if the portal wasn't a radical enough change in itself, Jewett and his IT team are also overseeing a switch to a new point-of-sale system—the system that retail IT execs often dread touching, never mind ripping out.

"You cold have put in the portal without the POS system," Jewett says. "But when we looked at the food strategy (and the company's looming need to do things like accept coupons), the old POS system couldn’t handle it."

Also, the company needed to accept payment types like food stamps and credit cards. "You could carry milk without a new POS system," Jewett says. "But you couldn't buy it with food stamps." Merchandising strategy was also begging for more power: "We were going to need a platform for more efficient execution of markdowns," for example, Jewett says.

Jewett and his team decided on a gradual POS rollout in concert with the store of the future revamp. First, they did one last upgrade to the legacy POS system, which was going to have to last several years for some stores until they got the new POS system. For that new POS software, Family Dollar chose technology from Triversity (now owned by SAP.)

Jewett prototyped the Triversity application in test stores, slowly: "We studied it for a good year," he says. Production rollouts began in March of 2007 and was to reach about 750 stores by August, Jewett says. Lesson learned: The business and IT sides of an organization both needed plenty of time to work with the prototype and the early implementations, and IT had to decide to learn as it went, Jewett says. "The business wanted time to study it. And we in IT knew that was a whole new architecture and we needed to expand our IT skills back here."

"As we've grown, we've developed some areas of expertise—project management, for example," he says. "That's helped us raise our process execution."

So far, so good: No major glitches with the POS system, he says. Today, Family Dollar accepts food stamps in the approximately 750 stores that have the Store of the Future setup. And it's testing credit cards in a limited number of stores.