Where Old-Fashioned Country
Style Meets High Tech

Cracker Barrel Old Country Store found a creative bar
code solution for its unique antiques inventory.

Entering a Cracker Barrel Old Country Store feels like stepping into a rural Southern general store of a bygone century. The air is perfumed with scented soaps and potpourri, and the toys, dolls, wreathes, candles and rocking chairs, among a vast variety of other merchandise on display, are beautifully hand-crafted. In keeping with the nostalgic ambiance, the store itself is furnished with interesting and authentic antiques. And if you've worked up an appetite while shopping, Cracker Barrel's restaurant will serve you a heaping plate of old-fashioned homestyle cooking.

Given the uniqueness implicit in genuine antique furnishings and handcrafted merchandise, it may come as a surprise to discover that the Cracker Barrel store you're visiting is but one of a chain of 220 stores just like it, located throughout 28 states and aggressively growing at an average rate of three new stores a month. Like every retailer on a rapid-growth track, Cracker Barrel relies on high-tech, automated information systems to support that growth, in particular a custom-designed, bar code-based warehouse system to manage its vast inventory of antique furnishings.

Larry Singleton, Manager for Cracker Barrel's Decorative Fixtures department, oversees a 25,000-square food, specially-designed facility located in Lebanon, Tennessee, for warehousing and staging of items used to furnish the new Cracker Barrel stores/restaurants as they're built. Before Cracker Barrel implemented the bar code-based system four years ago, inventory data was manually entered into an AS/400 that had only one terminal in the warehouse.

"The way we were tracking our inventory," Larry Singleton said, "was like the dark ages. When an antiques dealer came in with a delivery, which might vary anywhere from 50 pieces to up to as many as 8000, we'd write inventory numbers on tags and attach them to the pieces, and then write down the inventory numbers, descriptions, and item cost, and manually enter the data on the terminal. It was cumbersome and prone to inaccuracies.

"For shipping, we'd get a printout of items, take them to the store and check off the list. I didn't measure the cost of the intensive time and labor spent, or costs due to inaccuracies, but it had to be thousands and thousands of dollars.

In search of a Better System

Cracker Barrel had three pressing reasons to implement a more accurate and efficient system to track its antique furnishings. For accounting purposes, in order to depreciate fixed assets ( the antiques aren't sold as merchandise), they must be tracked in the warehouse and by store. Second, given the antique's value, misplaced items could be extremely costly. The third and most pressing problem was the growing volume of items passing through the warehouse, which Singleton estimates to be 80,000 to 90,000 items per year currently, that had to be individually tracked. More efficient automation had become a necessity.

"We looked at several different inventory systems," Singleton said. "Compsee had used their wedges to interface scanning and a check register/mag swipe reader at POS for us in our stores, and we were pleased with their level of support. I talked with them about some of the unique aspects of our situation, and it sounded like they could develop a system that met our needs. Our inventory is complicated by the staging function, and we also needed asset tracking for the individual stores, so they had to develop a system from the ground up that would fit our business."

System Profile

Larry Singleton and Inventory Control Supervisor, Joe Stewart, worked with Compsee on system design and development. Initially it took Compsee about two months to write and install the dBASE system, which resides on a Novel network of three PCs distributed throughout the warehouse, and six Mars MEQ430 portable batch scanner/terminals with 512K memory. The system tracks each item from receiving, though restoration to warehouse shelving, on to staging and ultimately to the final store destination.

"We attach a bar coded metal tag to every item as it's unloaded from the truck," Larry Singleton explained. Because the furnishings are expected to remain in each Cracker Barrel store over its lifetime, singleton chose Metalcraft aluminum bar coded tags for permanence. (The photo composed, 6-digit bar code on the tag is serialized numeric Code 39)

"Inventory personnel carefully attach the tags to each antique by wire or brads," Singleton said. "After the items are tagged, they scan the tag with the Mars MEQ and enter a description and cost on the MEQ's keyboard. If we get a lot of identical items, we enter the description and price once and scan tags for each piece." The data is then downloaded (via a cradle) into one of the networked PCs and a receipt is generated to be mailed to the seller. A copy also goes to accounts payable.

The antique furnishings are next sent to the restoration area for cleaning, repair and/or refinishing, and then stored in the warehouse on bar coded shelves or in bins. "The shelf or bin label and bar coded tags are scanned on putaway to associate the item with its location, and that data is downloaded into the warehouse system," Singleton said.

Staging the Store

For store designers, the pressure of three new openings a month are formidable when furnishings listings aren't accessible through catalogs, but via the information system and shelves of a 25,000-square-foot warehouse. To expedite store design logistics, Cracker Barrel has built a mock-store staging area in the warehouse that allows designers to pull inventory to create a layout for each new store, in advance.

"About eight to ten people are designing and pulling for store fronts all the time," Larry Singleton explained. "They can easily pull up items on the computer to check location and availability. They'll lay out the store and pull all items from stock, which are scanned to move them out of warehouse inventory and put them in a 'staged' file."

"These 'stores' (staged items for a particular store) are then assigned a store number. The selected items are packaged and stored (in a bar coded location) until shipment to the new store location. "When we're ready to ship to a store, we pull the stage location and download the data back into a MEQ, which is taken with the shipment to the delivery destination," Singleton explained. "At the store, each item is scanned into a location that's identified by an alphanumeric number from a bar coded menu, so the system will ultimately have a record of the exact location of each item in every store."

Benefits

Cracker Barrel hasn't quantified the system's cost benefits, though Larry Singleton estimates they are considerable. "Back four years ago, we might receive 2000 items and have two people tied up for the week writing inventory tags. It now takes half a day, at most," he said. "We simply wouldn't be able to track the amount of items we have coming in and going out now, without an automated system.

Periodically, Compsee has updated and added to the system to meet Cracker Barrel's evolving needs. The system's report capability has become more sophisticated, enabling reports on inventory quantity and cost, bin location, missing items, and individual store asset inventories.

For auditing purposes, inventory personnel perform ongoing cycle counts where they download several locations to the MEQ and go out and verify the items in them. Singleton estimates, based on these counts, that the warehouse inventory is about 95 percent accurate. "The system, on its own, is 100 percent accurate." He said, "but people will occasionally miss scanning an item they're pulling for a store, or return an item to the wrong bin."

As to the future, "We've looked at setting up with RF communications because we're not in real time now. But after the initial conversion period -which was accomplished with the help of Joe Stewart, who worked hard to get everyone on board and ease the changeover- the system's been running so smoothly we don't have a compelling need for real time transactions."

Reprinted From:

Helmers Publishing, Inc.