Wilco Intranet

WILCOHESS, located in Winston-Salem, NC, is a leading operator of travel plazas and convenience stores in the Southeastern United States. Wilco owns and manages 300+ stores that offer first class convenience and value to patrons.  Wilco offers a dynamite coffee program, monthly specials on soft drinks, and the best petroleum products available.

Challenge

Wilco had an immediate need to establish an Intranet site, a privately maintained computer network that can be accessed via Wilco’s Wide Area Network only by authorized employees of Wilco. This Intranet needed to:

• Provide electronic document and information sharing.
• Provide electronic forms management.
• Replace the current manual end of day reporting process with a more automated, paperless reporting format.

The objectives of this initiative were to reduce operating costs and increase operating efficiencies. The ROI for this project was realized through the following:

• Eliminating time spent by District Managers, Regional Managers, and home office staff on the current process of phoning in daily financial information to track sales and merchandise information.
• Eliminating costs for paper, ink, postage, and long-distance phone calls involved in the current financial reporting process. 
• Eliminating costs for paper and storage associated with the use of daily operational forms, plus manual re-keying of information.
• Eliminating costs of printed employee handbooks, policy and procedures updates, etc.
• Enhanced productivity due to more timely and consistent communications with the stores and employees via the Web.

Solution

Stratapult developed a custom Intranet application for Wilco using Cold Fusion software with a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database.

Wilco’s Intranet site provided Wilco’s store employees and managers the ability to:

• View information on company policies such as vacation time, dress code, pay procedures, etc.
• Enter information to eleven (11) administrative forms such as store supply, loss/robbery reports, gasoline drive off's, etc.
• Enter purchase orders for optional apparel uniforms via an Intranet form.
• Enter daily sales activity on the top 15 - 20 top items.

In addition, the Intranet allows Wilco Headquarter’s personnel the ability to:

• Add links to various corporate policy forms 
• View store level activity of 25-30 specific items
• Create PDF files from the Wilco Lawson Financials system and store them in specific folders 
• Update and maintain the PO item list and receive email notification of employee orders, as well as view those orders online.  
• Receive email notification of a form requiring approval. Approve or disapprove a form via the Intranet. Forms are routed appropriately to District managers, Regional managers and corporate based on the approval.

Impact

As a result of the automation the Intranet solution provides, Wilco has realized ongoing savings by eliminating costs associated with the manual data entry process to generate corporate reports. Breakeven was reached only two months after implementation.

Specifically, Wilco has realized management labor cost savings of five percent at the store, district, and regional level as a result of the automated Intranet process.  Also, distribution costs associated with the daily printing and mailing of reports have been eliminated- making Wilco’s corporate reporting process paperless.