case study
R.C. Willey
Regional Home Furnishings Retailer:
“U2 Software Makes Our Life Easier and Saves Us Money”
R.C. Willey is a western-based home furnishings retailer with stores in Utah, Idaho, Nevada and California.
Founded in 1932 by Rufus Call Willey, an appliance salesman working out of his pickup truck, the chain
was acquired by Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway in 1995 and is still family-operated. Now sporting
19 stores, the company offers a variety of merchandise categories, including furniture, appliances,
flooring, electronics and sleep products.
A Failure Can Lead to a Success
When Rich Sheridan, IT Manager for R.C. Willey Home Furnishings, recalls switching to Rocket’s U2
Software, it brings up distant memories. The same goes for Ned Jones, the company’s IT Director. After all,
both of them were instrumental in making that move nearly 14 years ago.
The mid 1990s saw changes for the company, including its purchase by investment giant Berkshire
Hathaway in 1995. The following year, the IT staff decided it was time to consider moving away from the
Sequoia software platform that was running many of the firm’s applications at the time. “Sequoia was a
wonderful product,” Sheridan recalls, “and we didn’t want to leave. But the vendor failed to focus on
research and development, and mishandled its business, which led to that company’s eventual demise.”
R.C. Willey
Salt Lake City
Long-time Rocket U2
users report that the
MultiValue software has
made their life easier
since switching to the
technology in 1998. Not
only has U2 enabled
decision-making, but it
has kept the IT staff
smaller and led to
considerable savings.
Sheridan and Jones wanted to stay in a MultiValue environment and began to research alternatives.
“Since we had to move, one of our key criteria was to look for a product that had some fault tolerance
built into the system,” said Sheridan. “We wanted a reliable product with few or no outages that wouldn’t
crash and cause the database to become corrupted.”
Unidata Makes Sense in Cost Analysis
In addition to speaking with other users, the pair conducted cost analyses and determined that UniData
best fit their criteria. He and Jones completed the implementation in 1998, and have never had any
regrets. Today the U2 platform runs virtually everything at R.C. Willey. All store locations connect to the
company’s data center in Idaho, with a single computer able to run all the firm’s applications: payroll,
inventory, sales, accounts receivable, accounts payable, etc. The company’s website is also back-ended
with U2.
Rocket
®
case study
Open Database Connectivity Provides Flexibility
“What’s good for Rocket U2
Jones particularly likes U2’s open database connectivity, which gives him lots of flexibility to provide data
for decision-making support. “We extract a lot of data for spreadsheet use,” he said. “Even though our
application is text-based, the open database lets us upload data to a business intelligence system, do
analysis on data cubes, drill down on data and export data to several vendors.” Jones said that none of
those functions were available on the old Sequoia system. “This is a big plus because it enables us to
move data into all these other platforms and make a lot of information available to a lot of users.”
software is good for us. We
want this company to be
around and keep developing
for a long, long time because
we like this product, we want
to be on it as it simplifies our
lives.”
Richard Sheridan
IT Manager
R.C. Willey
The RFS Capability’s Advantage
Sheridan points to UniData’s recoverable file system (RFS) capability as one of its most important features.
RFS enables IT staff to easily restore the database in the unlikely event of a crash. “I don’t think you can
underestimate the importance of UniData’s Recoverable File System,” he said. “If that didn’t work, every
time your system got sick and crashed, you would have corrupt data, and the file would be unusable. RFS
alone makes it worth using UniData!”
Runs Smoothly with Little to No Downtime and Low TCO
The system runs smoothly with 2,500 associates and 1,300 UniData user licenses. But, Sheridan explained,
if the system does go down, “we’ll have 600-700 users online within 2-3 minutes. If a file is corrupt, every
one of those users is going to have a headache. It’s extremely important to have your database back in a
consistent state as soon as possible.”
Sheridan noted that the benefits of using U2 are that it is simple, reliable, easy to use, and more costeffective compared to other products. “To put this into perspective, we have an IT staff of 25 people. We
could never do that with an Oracle or Sybase environment. The savings are huge across hardware,
staffing and support.”
Solid and Simple for the Future
Sheridan also had praise for Rocket’s product performance over time. “Over time, they have solidified it.
It’s running better now than it ever has. The product has clearly matured over the years,” he said. “What’s
good for Rocket U2 software is good for us. We want this company to be around and keep developing for
a long, long time because we like this product, we want to be on it as it simplifies our lives.”
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Inc. Other product and service names might be trademarks of Rocket Software or its affiliates.
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