Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
Customer Solution Case Study
Convenience Retailer Reduces Labor Management
Costs and Improves Customer Experience
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Retail
Customer Profile
Although the 450 QuikTrip convenience
stores and travel centers are company
owned and operated, each one runs as its
own profit center, and employees profit
proportionately from their hard work.
“Visual Studio also lets us go back and interact with
existing applications and older technologies. That
results in a phenomenal payback for us.”
Stephen Hunter, Project Manager, QuikTrip
QuikTrip Corporation, with more than 450 owner/operated
convenience stores and travel centers, is decorated with several
Solution
QuikTrip developers created a self-serve
human resource and career management
solution by using Microsoft® Visual Studio®
.NET 2003 Professional development
system.
quality-focused awards, including being on the list of Fortune
magazine’s 100 best employers. Each store operates as its own
profit center, and QuikTrip rewards success with bonuses and
internal advancement based on individual and store performance.
QuikTrip wanted an easy way to articulate these performance
metrics to employees. The corporation also wanted to simplify labor
management and reduce costs. QuikTrip developed a custom, selfserve human resources application that meets its cost reduction
objectives (saving U.S.$320,000 a year in labor scheduling and
Benefits
 Greater employee satisfaction
 Effective development environment
 Increased developer productivity
 High return on technology investment
time-off management costs alone). Accessing performance
measures in this Web-based application, employees have a greater
sense of ownership and self-determination and can see a bright
career path with QuikTrip.
Business Situation
QuikTrip wanted to explicitly relate
individual and store performance goals and
measures with bonus eligibility and make
personalized career path information
available anytime.
Situation
QuikTrip owns and operates more than 450
convenience stores and travel centers in 9
states. Its products and services include
truck fleet diesel-fueling programs. Last year,
the company did over U.S.$4 billion in sales
and ranked thirty-eighth on the Forbes List of
Privately Held Companies. The company’s
commitment to excellence in everything it
does and sells has earned QuikTrip a national
reputation for quality and customer service.
QuikTrip has also earned accolades as an
employer. For the last three years, Fortune
magazine has named QuikTrip as one of the
top 100 best companies to work for, this year
coming in at number 19. The company
costs, and ultimately had a negative impact
on customer experience.
Explains Chris Truesdell, Director of
Technology at QuikTrip, “Sometimes we’d be
overstaffed in one store and understaffed in
another. Balancing resources on the spot
required a lot of phone calls. Understaffing
might require someone to work a double
shift, incurring higher costs in the form of
overtime pay.”
Because each store is its own profit center,
employees are responsible for all aspects of
the business and profit directly from their
hard work and attention to detail. To support
this profit-sharing model, the company
Fast Facts
“Remoting and Web
services provide a very
powerful, yet simple,
means for
communicating with
remote devices, such as
our store-based
biometrics systems.”
Billy Walton, Programmer/Analyst, QuikTrip
Development environment
Visual Studio .NET 2003 Professional Edition
Programming languages
Visual C# .NET 2003, Visual Basic .NET 2003
Total developers
15
Lines of code, inclusive
Approximately 100,000
Time to develop solution
Nine months
Number of application users
More than 5,500
Transactions per week, inclusive
Tens of thousands
commitment to employees is evident in ways
you might expect: The company offers
competitive wages, benefits, flexible
schedules, and a strict policy of promotion
from within.
collects myriad reports related to employee
and store performance, reports such as cash
handling and analysis accuracy, voids and
refund processing, store inventory results,
and so on. QuikTrip uses this data to
determine employee performance and
eligibility for bonuses and advancement. The
company wanted to put this performance
information into hands of employees,
believing that doing so would give employees
an even greater sense of ownership, control,
and pride in their work.
In evaluating its operations in light of tight
retail margins, QuikTrip found that human
resources-related tasks—such as scheduling
personnel, timekeeping, and vacation
authorizations—were extremely laborintensive and, therefore, costly. In fact, these
tasks required one full-time employee in each
of QuikTrip’s eight divisions. The manual,
paper-based processes burdened both store
employees and regional managers with a lot
of administrative tasks, left room for errors,
oversights, even lost paperwork, increased
“Every employee wants a certain amount of
control over his or her own destiny, but in so
many companies, the objectives and
measures can be obscure, or might only be
measured and reported periodically—for
example, at annual review time,” says RJ
Jeffers, Vice President of Operations Systems,
QuikTrip.
Already recognized as a supportive employer,
QuikTrip nevertheless wanted to go the extra
mile for its employees. Jeffers elaborates, “To
give employees a sense of control and selfdetermination, we wanted to make
performance goals and measures, bonus
eligibility, and personalized career path
information available anytime and in a format
that’s as concrete and clear as possible.”
QuikTrip sought a way to provide store
employees and managers with self-directed
human resource and career management
services and solutions while, at the same
time, automating human resources–related
aspects of its operations, thereby lowering
costs.
Solution
A team of developers created Employee
Profile Information Center (EPIC) by using
Microsoft® Visual Studio® .NET 2003
EPIC Technical Architecture
Professional development system. More than
5,500 store employees and managers use
EPIC daily.
Developers created the Web-based EPIC
system by using the Microsoft Visual
Basic®.NET 2003 development system. To
write custom classes that encapsulated the
company’s business logic, programmers used
the Visual Basic .NET or the Microsoft Visual
C#® .NET 2003 development tool
programming languages, depending on
developer preference.
The application uses Web services to access
databases that are running either Microsoft
SQL Server™ 2000 Enterprise Edition or
AS400 DB2 database. The application
connects with the QuikTrip back-office
financial and human resources system, which
is JD Edwards’s World.
A total of 15 developers worked on the
application, which was developed in three
phases:
In Phase I, the company created labor
management elements of the application,
including code for the biometrics hardware.
In this phase, former AS400 DB2
developers experienced in COBOL and RPG
programming were able to quickly get up to
speed in Visual Basic .NET 2003
programming and working in the Microsoft
.NET–connected environment.
 In Phase II, developers created elements of
the application related to personnel and
human resources data, including the Web
interface used by employees and store
managers.
 In Phase III, the team developed the parts
of the application that process employee
information related to training, benefits,
and so on.
order to give store employees and managers
Web access to EPIC from anywhere.
Developing the Front End
The solution uses biometrics hardware (a
thumbprint reader) at the stores for employee
timekeeping. Every hour, the timekeeping
interface at each store checks for updates
locally. Updates include the profile, including
biometric information, of every employee who
is supposed to be on duty.
The division personnel manager would
previously spend days collecting and
inputting requests. Now, employees input
their own vacation requests into EPIC, and
EPIC automatically notifies them by posting a
notice on their personal Web page when their
request has been approved or denied.

"I doubt we could have
accomplished what we
did, were it not for
ASP.NET. Had we been
using ASP with DHTML,
we would still be
working on Phase I of
EPIC today.”
Billy Walton, Programmer/Analyst, QuikTrip
Developers used Visual Basic .NET to code
the system that interfaces with the biometrics
hardware. Because the system also can be
accessed by applications that were written in
Microsoft Visual Basic version 6.0, this part
of the solution was exposed as a component
object model (COM) interface by simply
placing a compiler attribute on the class
modules in the code, so that the class
modules could be registered as a COM
object.
Each store employee has a personal Web
page for accessing EPIC, and can view
personal performance measures and
comparative standing within the division.
Developers designed and created the various
Web interfaces by using Microsoft ASP.NET in
Automating Labor Management
EPIC automates personnel scheduling and
vacation staffing and, by doing so, replaces
paper forms with an online application used
by supervisors and employees. Employees
submit vacation requests at the beginning of
the year. The back-office system then
approves or rejects time-off requests by
making determinations based on seniority,
position, and other factors.
“You can see how, in just one division,
Atlanta—for example—with 1,500 employees,
vacation planning could get pretty involved,”
says Jeffers.
EPIC even schedules vacation relief staff far
in advance, so they know when and where
they’re scheduled to report to work. The
system also handles relief coverage for time
off due to illness or bereavement. Employees
who need time off call their manager. That
manager updates EPIC. EPIC then assigns the
relief worker, and the manager notifies the
needed replacement.
EPIC also helps QuikTrip better handle
personnel management. The system reduces
paperwork by automating the tracking and
notifications related to personnel actions,
such as training requirements, benefits
eligibility, performance reviews, and
disciplinary actions. A batch process that runs
nightly posts notices to an employee’s
personal Web site when, for example, they
are eligible for benefits or must attend a
required training course. Employees access
the notices from their personal Web page. For
items that require a personal
acknowledgement of receipt or acceptance,
employees use the thumbprint reader to
provide a digital signature.
Benefits
“Store employees and
managers benefit from a
Web interface that is
familiar and easy to use
because it is quite
similar to other Web
browsing they might do.”
Chris Truesdell, Director of Technology,
QuikTrip
Because of its investment in EPIC and use of
the Visual Studio .NET development system,
QuikTrip has increased efficiencies across its
operations, vastly improved labor
management operations, and met the
company’s goal of improving employee
ownership, and, ultimately, customer
satisfaction.
“EPIC raises the bar on our commitment to
excellence and links operational
improvements with a better customer
experience. The system does a lot of great
things for the company and even more great
things for the employee,” says Truesdell. EPIC
reduces labor management costs
considerably. Cost savings for the company
due to the improvements in labor scheduling
and time-off management, alone, have been
estimated at $320,000 a year, and QuikTrip
continues to tally the benefits.
Greater Employee Satisfaction
With EPIC, employees are more in control of
their own performance achievements and
can set personal goals and chart a career
path. Employees can view concrete measures
along with their relative standing among
other employees in the same position and
division.
“Store employees and managers benefit from
a Web interface that is familiar and easy to
use because it is quite similar to other Web
browsing they might do,” says Truesdell.
“More importantly, they now have the tools to
monitor their own numbers and divisional
ranking, any time. Compared with industry
averages, we already have one of the lowest
turnover rates in the nation among our fulltime store employees and managers; with
EPIC, we expect it will fall even lower.
Employees are self-informed and selfmotivated to strive for even higher levels of
excellence, and that leads to increasingly
satisfied customers.”
EPIC vastly improves vacation planning,
approvals, and relief-staff scheduling, and
reduces effort, costs, and errors. “Previously
a vacation request form might have been lost
or misplaced, and no one wants to miss out
on a vacation because of an error. EPIC
greatly reduces that risk,” says Truesdell.
Effective Development Environment
Working with Visual Studio .NET, QuikTrip
developers were highly productive. They
benefited from the ability to merge datasets,
which, unlike their previous environment,
“makes querying data from SQL Server and
AS400 DB2 at the same time possible and
fast,” according to Billy Walton,
Programmer/Analyst for QuikTrip.
Creating user-friendly reports that make the
most of company data and databases was
easy for the QuikTrip development team.
Walton explains, “With .NET databound
controls (for example, datagrid, dropdownlist,
and calendar), it was easy to intercept return
data from a dataset and re-direct the output
so that it is in a user-friendly format.
We were able to intercept what was going to
be rendered and change it ‘on the fly’.”
The team used Visual Studio .NET to design
and develop a number of Web services. They
used remoting and Web services in a number
of places in EPIC. “Remoting and Web
services provide a very powerful, yet simple,
means for communicating with remote
devices, such as our store-based biometrics
systems,” says Walton.
Increased Developer Productivity
Using ASP.NET saved developers a
tremendous amount of time. Says Walton, “I
doubt we could have accomplished what we
did, were it not for ASP.NET. Had we been
using ASP with DHTML, we would still be
working on Phase I of EPIC today.”
Developers also benefited from the rapid
development nature of ASP.NET. “The ability
to quickly create prototype pages and get
them in front of internal customers and
managers and, then, whip through a large
number of iterations and screens quickly was
a big help,” says Walton.
The EPIC development team
Ellen Ellis: Director of Business Solutions
Stephen Hunter: Project Manager
Yas Nakayama: Programmer/Analyst 1
Kelly Klein: Programmer
Syd Cripe: Programmer
Tim Hitz: Programmer
Adds Stephen Hunter, Project Manager,
“Developer productivity is a big thing.
Developers reused approximately 20 percent
of the code they wrote. This 20 percent code
reuse reflects Web services and a variety of
components for display and retrieval of
information.”
High Return on Technology Investment
“Because we are using a variety of
technologies together, such as ASP.NET and
remoting, we benefit from the fact that the
frameworks are consistent with one another,”
says Hunter.
Billy Walton: Programmer/Analyst 1
Jim Yates: Programmer
Todd Carter: Programmer/Analyst 1
Joe Domeier: Systems Analyst
Clint Davis: Programmer/Analyst 1
Verna Davis: Programmer/Analyst 2
Matt Meadors: Sr. Systems Analyst
Jeff Ream: Programmer
Duane Coppick: Systems Analyst
With Visual Studio .NET, the QuikTrip
development team can develop cutting-edge,
connected applications. But the benefits
don’t stop there. “Visual Studio also lets us
go back and interact with existing
applications and older technologies. That
results in a phenomenal payback for us,”
remarks Hunter. “For example, we use
[Microsoft] Access 2.0 in a few applications in
our stores, but it’s still very convenient and
gives us a high return if we can upgrade
software on some of our devices but retain
and access legacy systems.”
The savings of $320,000 a year in labor
scheduling and management costs is just one
example of the efficiencies QuickTrip gains
from EPIC and the Visual Studio .NET
development system. Labor scheduling and
vacation authorizations once required eight
full-time staff. Now, these staff can be reassigned to other important positions in the
company. Increased automation and reduced
paperwork result in better and more accurate
scheduling and staffing, and lower labor
costs.
“EPIC has resolved scheduling issues and
reduced incidents of double coverage or
under-coverage. It has also reduced the
number of vacation-relief employees on the
clock at any given time,” concludes Truesdell.
For More Information
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
Microsoft .NET Framework
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
Sales Information Center at (800) 4269400. In Canada, call the Microsoft
Canada Information Centre at (877) 5682495. Customers who are deaf or hard-ofhearing can reach Microsoft text telephone
(TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in
the United States or (905) 568-9641 in
Canada. Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access information
using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET is the rapid
application development (RAD) tool for
building next-generation Web applications
and XML Web services. Visual Studio .NET
empowers developers to rapidly design
broad-reach Web applications for any device
and any platform. In addition, Visual Studio
.NET is fully integrated with the Microsoft
.NET Framework, providing support for
multiple programming languages and
automatically handling many common
programming tasks, freeing developers to
rapidly create Web applications using their
language of choice.
The Microsoft .NET Framework is an integral
Windows® component for building and
running the next generation of applications
and Web services.
For more information about QuikTrip
Corporation products and services, call
(918) 615-7700 or visit the Web site at:
www.quiktrip.com
For more information about Visual Studio
.NET, go to:
msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio
For more information about the .NET
Framework, go to:
msdn.microsoft.com/netframework
Acquire Visual Studio .NET:
msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy
MSDN® Subscriptions:
msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions
Software and Services
Microsoft Windows Server System™
− Microsoft Windows Server 2003
− Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise
Edition
− Microsoft Windows 2000 Server
 Microsoft Windows XP Professional
 Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 2003
Professional Edition
− Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003
− Microsoft Visual C# .NET 2003
−

© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case
study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO
WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Microsoft, MSDN, Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual Studio, the
Visual Studio logo, Windows, Windows Server, and Windows
Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks
of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other
countries. All other trademarks are the property of their
respective owners.
Document published June 2005

Technologies
− Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1
− Microsoft ASP.NET