Army and Air Force Exchange Service expands NCR Data Warehouse to assist in global growth.

DAYTON, Ohio--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 4, 1997--

Data warehousing allows retailer to better understand

its customers' buying patterns worldwide

The Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES), a global retailer with locations on all U.S. military bases, is expanding its NCR scalable data warehousing solution to help evaluate and predict sales and inventory performance throughout the world.

As part of a $9 million contract, AAFES will add eight multi-node WorldMark 5100M massively parallel processing servers running NCR Teradata RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) for UNIX and NCR TOP END enterprise middleware software.

NCR's data warehousing solution helps streamline sales and inventory processes by allowing AAFES to more accurately purchase and allocate products based on customer need, perform promotional analysis and identify merchandise markdown in order to minimize revenue loss.

"We need to command our range of merchandise with the precision and accuracy of a Desert Storm sortie," said Larry Morris, senior business analyst in AAFES' Sales Directorate. "With hundreds of thousands of individual products shipping to stores throughout the U.S. and worldwide, including locations as remote as Bosnia, this is a significant challenge. Our goal is to deliver the right merchandise, at the right price, to the right place, while keeping inventory to a minimum. NCR is helping us reach that goal."

Using the data warehouse, a health and beauty aids buyer for AAFES was able to reduce stock assortment by 36 percent and still raise revenues nine percent by allocating more shelf space to best-selling items. Other buyers are able to quickly identify slow-moving items, so they can either mark them down or replace them with high-volume products.

"The issue of evaluating and predicting retail sales and inventory performance across many stores and locations is a significant issue for all retailers," said Mark Hurd, marketing vice president for NCR's Computer Systems Group. "It impacts all areas of the business, from purchasing and allocation to promotional effectiveness and price management. Using NCR data warehousing technology, however, AAFES is showing other retailers how to tap into its information repositories and make profitable decisions."

The NCR Teradata system enables accurate forecasting of future sales activity through the analysis of two years' worth of past sales data. By uncovering trends that were previously difficult to identify, the system takes the guesswork out of proper stocking at the store level, resulting in a 98 percent service-level accuracy.

NCR also is providing AAFES with a market basket analysis application that will help AAFES better understand its customers. By knowing what products customers buy, and in what combinations, AAFES will target specific customers to market directly to them with frequent-shopper programs and other loyalty incentives.

To keep up with AAFES' rapid growth, the NCR WorldMark servers, which will be installed in AAFES' data center located in Dallas, Texas, can scale up to thousands of Intel processors.

About AAFES

The Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) is a $7 billion per year retailer serving 12 million U.S. military and government personnel worldwide. The chain includes 230 general merchandise stores that rival Kmart and Wal-Mart in size, 600 specialty stores such as liquor, sporting goods and furniture stores, 125 food courts, 120 Burger Kings, and dozens of movie theaters and bowling alleys. AAFES also operates hundreds of gas stations, barber shops, beauty parlors and coffee shops.

More information on AAFES can be found on the World Wide Web: http://www.aafes.com.

About NCR

NCR (NYSE: NCR) is the leader in delivering commercial open computer systems for transaction processing and decision-support solutions to customers in all industries. The company, with headquarters in Dayton, Ohio, has 38,000 employees, including 20,000 service professionals in 1,100 locations and 130 countries. NCR solutions help improve businesses by turning customer information into results, protecting existing information technology investments, reducing risks and ensuring success.

More information on NCR can be found on the World Wide Web: http://www.ncr.com. -0- NCR WorldMark is a trademark and NCR Teradata RDBMS and NCR TOP END are registered trademarks of NCR Corporation. All other product names are trademarks of their respective holders.

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