Method Study Program

This program is used by Safeway in its regular studies of staffing requirements for stores. Handheld Palm Pilots are used for recording the activities of store employees at various points in time. The portion of the Method Study Program which runs on Windows on a PC manages employee ID and schedule information, and uploads employee information to the Palm Pilot based on rules designed to insure statistical validity of the observations. After observations are made and recorded, the results are downloaded from the Palm to the PC, where they are used for producing reports and are exportable to other systems for further analysis.

Salary Targeting and Reporting System

A number of years ago, Safeway asked us to convert a 20-year old mainframe application and reimplement it as a PC-based client-server system. This system tracks on a weekly basis shipments from company warehouses to stores, sales from these stores, and receipts of merchandise directly from vendors. From this information, calculations are performed which predict the required manhours for store departments as a function of sales. The analysis which is performed is quite extensive and complex.

The STAR system has been used successfully in all Safeway divisions for more than ten years, undergoing more or less continual enhancement throughout this period. Most recently, in addition to ongoing functional improvements, the system has been modified to process all Safeway Divisions centrally, based on more unified controls. The system is also undergoing a database conversion from Informix to DB2.

Pipeline Inspection Maintenance Optimization System

This system is called PIMOS, and it allows owners of pipelines to plan cost-effective pipeline maintenance strategies.

The system consists of a C++ shell which coordinates a FoxPro UI and database, a GIS mapping system, and a DOS optimization program. Woodward-Clyde asked us to make modifications to this system and to a companion product called CIMOS (Cast-Iron Maintenance Optimization System).

Promotion Effectiveness Model

In an effort directed by Bain and Company, Eagle developed versions of this "Promotion Effectiveness Model" for three different divisions of Nestle.

The program allows Nestle sales people to work with customers to plan "optimal" promotion strategies for Nestle products. The analyses are very complex, taking into account such factors as the number of weeks a product is to be promoted, margin percentage, cost of running the promotion, sales "lift" anticipated (based on Nielson data), and so on.

This series of systems was very effective for Nestle.

Multimedia Reach Frequency

This program was designed for advertising agencies in developing multi-media advertising plans for their clients.

Using extensive information about Radio, TV, Cable, and Newspaper media in a given geographic area, the program can compute advertising costs and effective reach for a mixture of media. This allows the agency to experiment with the proportions, for example, of cost spent on TV vs. newspaper, in order to arrive at an optimal "reach" for an ad campaign for a given budget.