Industry: Retail
Grocery Outlet is a chain of more than 300 family-owned deep-discount grocery stores based in Berkeley, Calif., with more than 1.5 million weekly shoppers throughout the U.S.. The retailer has been helping their customers save big on the brands they know and love since 1946 and is the nation’s largest extreme value retailer.
Homegrown: Good for Produce; Not for File Transfers
“We had always transferred files between our systems with homegrown FTP scripts, but knew we needed a better solution. That's when we started our search for a more robust tool,” said Steve Tuscher, Director of IT, Grocery Outlet. Tuscher helps oversee the technology side of the business which includes more than 33,000 file transfers each day. Writing the scripts for these transfers was time consuming, but the real challenge the IT team faced was tracking down what happened if a file exchange failed.
The grocer primarily wanted to send files back and forth reliably and in a controlled manner. They also sought a solution that included error reporting functionality that was platform independent, as they exchange files with multiple vendors, suppliers, and other trading partners daily.
“One of our vendors suggested a file transfer tool but it was priced out at $100,000, and we didn't want to do that,” said Tuscher. “We knew of GoAnywhere Managed File Transfer (MFT) because they'd been in the AS400 (IBM i) world for a couple decades at least, the same as we have been. We thought we'd give GoAnywhere MFT a shot. It's been a great product. It worked from day one and it's worked ever since,” he noted.
Bargain Retailer Gets Money’s Worth with GoAnywhere’s Capabilities
While GoAnywhere does the heavy lifting on the large number of daily files transferred as expected, Tusher discovered another surprising benefit of GoAnywhere MFT— managing the many emails received and creating a reporting system for them as well.
“After we learned that GoAnywhere can retrieve mail from an Exchange mailbox, we developed an automated script to do that. It checks for incoming mail every three seconds and launches a job based on if there's new mail on the IBM i . We then take that request, run another job, then return the email with a report. It's a handy little email-based reporting system that's very popular,” noted Tusher.
GoAnywhere not only offers users a way to simplify and secure their file transfers, keeping sensitive data secure both at rest and in motion, it also helps retailers, such as Grocery Outlet, meet stringent security and compliance regulations surrounding how data is handled, such as with PCI DSS compliance, with auditing and reporting functionality, as well as strong encryption and security protocols.
“All the other extras that came with it, and all of the ways we're using GoAnywhere now has been like a bonus,” noted Tusher. In particular, he called out the solution’s scripting language. “The robustness of that language has been a real surprise – a pleasant surprise.”
GoAnywhere’s ease-of-use, and ability to manage the many file transfers occurring each day without the need to write homemade FTP scripts allows the Grocery Outlet’s IT team to spend their time on more critical, and less manually intensive tasks.
GoAnywhere Improved Grocer’s Workflows and Partner Relations
The grocery chain extracts much of its data from FTP scripts. With GoAnywhere, the previously complex process now runs unattended every night. “It's been great. Just having the ability to run an FTP script to get data, zip it up, and send it somewhere has been phenomenal,” noted Tusher.
The GoAnywhere solution saves Grocery Outlet’s IT team time in two ways: problem resolution and eliminating the problems all together. “Typically, you'd copy some script and create a new script, and it would generally run. The problem is that when it wouldn't run, you wouldn't find out about it until it's too late, or until people are waiting for their orders or you have a crisis situation,” noted Tusher.
“The real time savings in GoAnywhere is that it basically never fails. That thing is rock solid. I can't remember the last time we had a failure due to GoAnywhere. If there's a failure, it's because the receiving side is down or not available,” he added.
With GoAnywhere quickly replacing all internal FTP scripts the grocer transformed their data delivery across all their business partners and all internal systems. Tushner noted his surprise at being able to do so as quickly and as easily as they did. The biggest surprise for the company, however, was how they use the email retrieval function. “That has been a huge homerun application for being able to request and report on your phone, and have it delivered back to your phone, like a sales report, within seconds. The response time is amazing! Literally within seconds you’re able to get a nicely formatted HTML email report on your phone, no matter where you are, via GoAnywhere. That has been great,” said Tusher.
GoAnywhere Offers Bargain Grocer Quick ROI
“We just look forward to more… what's next, or what's on the project horizon for GoAnywhere. We try to stay up to date on the releases so that we can take advantage of any new stuff that comes around,” added Tusher.
Tusher is enthusiastic in his recommendation of GoAnywhere, exclaiming, “It will be the easiest implementation you've ever had. It will be the best value of software that you've ever had. And you'll be sorry if you do not explore this package.”
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