The Challenge

Piggly Wiggly Midwest stores regularly place replenishment orders with their central warehouse. Employees, often department managers, need a quick way to identify products that are running low and build an order while walking through the store.

That doesn’t always happen somewhere with a reliable internet connection. Employees may be ordering from store aisles, walk-in coolers, or freezers where Wi-Fi may be weak or unavailable.

The Solution

Since 2012, Piggly Wiggly Midwest has used Order Trakker to allow employees at individual stores to build replenishment orders as they walk through their departments.

Employees can scan a product’s SKU or UPC from the product or shelf tag, enter the quantity needed, and continue through the store building the order.

Order Trakker receives the product information needed for ordering, including SKU, UPC, description, department, and case or package quantity.

Because Order Trakker works offline, employees can continue scanning and building an order in areas without a connection—including walk-in coolers and freezers. Even during a larger network outage, the order can still be created and submitted once connectivity is available.

Connecting to Their Existing System

When an order is submitted, Order Trakker creates it in the file format that Piggly Wiggly Midwest defined and places it in a shared location. Their existing backend system then picks up the file and processes the order through its normal workflow.

The integration is intentionally simple: Order Trakker works with the interface their existing system requires rather than requiring Piggly Wiggly Midwest to change its backend ordering system.

Evolving With Their Business

As Piggly Wiggly Midwest has grown and added stores, Longwell Technologies has continued to provide and configure rugged mobile devices for new locations.

Recent deployments arrive with Order Trakker installed and the scanner, keyboard, and device settings configured for Piggly Wiggly’s Midwest workflow. Longwell Technologies is also implementing mobile device management and device lockdown, allowing the devices to arrive ready for Piggly Wiggly to assign to a store and put into service.

Order Trakker has also evolved with their requirements. For example, Piggly Wiggly Midwest needed the ability to restrict a device to ordering only for specific departments, and that capability was added to the system.

Today, approximately 80 devices are being used across Piggly Wiggly Midwest locations as the company continues its 14-year relationship with Longwell Technologies.

The Result

 Stores have a simple, reliable way to scan and submit replenishment orders to their central warehouse—even in areas without internet access—using rugged devices configured around their ordering process.