Nebraska Furniture Mart's Database Migration to Reality Goes Smoothly

When planned events go as expected, some might say that there is no news to report. But in the world of database migrations, when there are no problems, that is something to talk about.
Northgate Information Solutions and the Nebraska Furniture Mart (NFM) have announced the successful migration of NFM's retail applications for its Kansas, MO, and Omaha, NE, locations to Reality, a MultiValue relational data management system provided by Northgate. For more than 60 years, NFM has sold a wide range of goods, including furniture, appliances, electronics, computers and flooring. Northgate assisted NFM in migrating nearly a billion data records together with the suite of sophisticated in-house retail applications used by NFM, the largest home furnishings store in the U.S.

Founded in 1969, Northgate has over 6,000 staff and operates in 46 counties across five continents. Before switching to Northgate's Reality, NFM had been using mvEnterprise.

NFM initially sent out its request for bids on their database upgrade to many vendors in early 2005, John Seaman, Reality sales director, told DBTA. He said that NFM put vendors through a rigorous process which included calling the IT vendors' customers. By the end of the first-round of evaluations, Northgate was on a short list of two. Feedback from existing users helped with the selection process.

According to David Ragan, NFM's senior database administrator, a key point that emerged from conversations with customers was that Reality users couldn't remember the last time their system crashed.

And in fact, the wisdom of the choice of Reality was confirmed after the process of going live was deemed a non-event, according to Seaman.

When the new system went live at NFM at the end of October 2007, the transition was so smoothly that users didn’t noticed the cut-over. “It was very interesting. They have over 2,000 users on this system. It is an enormous store,“ Seaman said. Following the switch to the new system, “when they opened the doors, everybody expected problems, “ Seaman added, recalling that NFM and Northgate staff were standing by to field calls and deal with any issues if needed, but the calls never came.

An even tougher test of Reality's resilience came on Black Friday, when sales volumes is greater than on any other day of the year, and peak-time crowds can reach 3,000 in a single store location. On Black Friday at NFM, said Seaman, “foot traffic goes up 10 times.” But the retailer got through the challenge and headed full steam into the holiday season.

According to Northgate, its engineers also speeded up the data change-over process by pioneering a new technique that took completed transactions from the live mvEnterprise system and dropped them into the waiting Reality database, resulting in a near-real-time copy of the live database. The technique cut switch-over down-time to less than an hour.

The takeaway from the implementation, Seaman said, “is that other people who are large users of MultiValue, and who are on an aging version of one kind or another, should consider Northgate and Reality as an option when they are thinking about making a change for the future.” It is not only for small organizations, he said. As the NFM implementation shows, large organizations “should not be concerned that Reality cannot support them,” he said.

For more information about Northgate, go here or email John Seaman at realityusa@northgate-is.com.