Swedish retailer taps Starcounter to power supply chain management application

Stockholm, Sweden -- Starcounter announced that its high performance in-memory NoSQL database powers the supply chain management application utilized by Gekas, a superstore in Sweden visited by 4.5 million customers each year. With 100,000 different products in stock and all items in its warehouse sold out more than three times per week, Gekas uses the low-cost system from Heads, a real-time retail application vendor, to integrate and streamline its entire supply chain, from procurement and its central warehouse to customer sales.



“Big standard supply chain management solutions are too complex and expensive, and most other systems are focused on financials and bookkeeping. We wanted an ERP system that focuses on our critical business processes, and the Heads solution based on Starcounter’s NoSQL database fit the bill,” said Johan Armfelt, CIO of Gekas. “In addition to centralizing all of our retail items in real time, the solution lowers our maintenance costs, as all data is stored in just one central server. It also cost less to develop compared to buying a big standard system and having to customize it to meet our needs.”



Starcounter’s database enables Heads to provide Gekas with a high performance system that processes large volumes of ACID-compliant database transactions per second on a single server. The database also offers continuous traceability of all retail items in real time. For example, for each product, Gekas’ procurement officer can see how much has been sold and how much remains in stock, both in real time.