In 1998 Barnes & Noble asked us to help implement a real-time demand analysis tool to help with warehouse inventory issues they were facing.
This system was a real-time process that aggregated warehouse inventory allocations and presented various views of the data to users via online repots. The reports were able to show both real-time and historical demand.
B&N was able to react to spikes in inventory usage in real-time and mitigate “out of stock” scenarios.
The client had an existing SQL Server 6.5 database in place. We implemented a series of stored procedures and triggers that would run the aggregation logic in real-time. The SQL stored procedures and triggers needed to be highly optimized because they were run synchronously during the manipulation of the data. Crystal Reports was used as the reporting mechanism.