Siemens Nixdorf Information Systems Ltd has won a five-year multi-vendor support contract with Selfridges, the Oxford Street, London department store, to maintain computer systems and cabling. Neither Siemens Nixdorf nor the store, which is part of Sears Plc, have disclosed the value of the five-year contract, but Selfridges says it is a multi-million pound deal. Under the terms of the deal, the UK subsidiary of Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG will support 430 of its own recently installed Beetle point-of-sale terminals, associated peripherals, personal computers and cabling. Two Siemens Nixdorf engineers will be available for on-site support, seven days a week. Siemens Nixdorf’s success with the department store follows on from its UKP3.5m deal to equip Selfridges with the Beetles and train staff in their use. In winning the contract, its first with a UK department store, Siemens beat IBM UK Ltd, ICL Plc and AT&T Global Information Solutions. Pilot tests using the Beetles in two of Selfridges 300 departments were carried out in the autumn of last year and installation of the new retail terminals, which replaced eight-year-old IBM terminals, has just been completed. Selfridges’s information system comprises a selection of servers, the personal computer-based Beetles, video display units and communication links to the outside world. It has three IBM RS/6000s: two are application servers for the Beetles and one is for the back office system. The RS/6000s are linked to two IBM AS/400s: one finance, one merchandise. The RS/6000 are linked to credit card and cheque authorisation companies. From the computer room housing the RS/6000s and AS/400s there is fibre optic cabling to 26 points within the store. From those 26 points, Category 5 unshielded twisted pair runs to individual tills, personal computer local networks, displays and telephones.

Central help desk

The tills are on Ethernet links, the AS/400s on a Token Ring and the RS/6000s on a Fibre Distributed Data Interface link. The Beetles run customised retail software and the back office system is AIX. The Beetles’ central help desk can scrutinise and take control of the keyboard of any till in the store, obviating the need for support staff actually to descend to the sales floor. The introduction of the Beetles it part of a UKP50m revamp Selfridges is undertaking in a bid to remain attractive to shoppers tempted away from the High Street by the proliferatiion in the UK of out-of-town shopping centres. Selfridges is attempting to elevate the act of purchase into something more akin to theatre and in this, semantics plays a great part. So sales staff become sales associates, Beetle point-of-sale machines become point of service machines and so on. The Beetles were attractive to Selfridges because of their modular MS-DOS and Unix-compatible design; this ensures they can link in to existing store systems and that Selfridges is not locked into a single supplier either in terms of hardware or software. It means too that parts can be updated as and when they are needed, like processor, memory or screens. The Beetles can have Smart Card readers attached to them, something that the store might consider: it is looking at optical character recognition facilities. The point-of-sale terminals support on-line credit card authorisation. Via an X25 link it now takes five seconds to authorise a purchase, before it was half a minute. The Beetles can access 420,000 stock-keeping units and can handle up to 1.25m units. Customer addresses can be captured from just the post code, speeding up transacions and enabling Selfridges to target mailshots to its card holders by analysing what their purchase interests are. Information on post codes is updated quarterly. The machine also does standard things like print and authorise cheques and can handle eight currencies: customers can pay in US or Canadian dollars, yen, lira, Spanish paseta, Deutsche mark and French franc. There is a minimum size of note accepted and change is given in sterling, but Selfridges says that since the service’s in

troduction in September it has been very popular. Using the Beetles, Selfridges is planning to enable its customers to pay their store card bill at any terminal, to receive an electronic catalogue of bulky products not on display in the shop, to make them multimedia machines and even self-service points for card holders. It also wants to be able to deal with reimbursing foreign vistors their value-added tax.

@HLEARMONTH & BURCHETT ANNOUNCE FIRST STAGE IN OBJECT REPOSITORY FOR ENTERPRISE APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT WORK@I2560@J02560@E7 Dec 1994@D941207@M9412@Y94@CANNOUNCEMENT@TLondon-based Learmonth & Burchett Management Systems Plc has announced Common Object Repository Environment, an object-oriented framework for building large enterprise applications, and has introduced the latest incarnation of its Computer Aided Software Engineering tool, SystemEngineer 5.2. The CORE Common Object Repository Environment, which to date only works with the Learmonth’s client-server System Engineer and ProcessEngineer product suites, is designed to provide a central store of designs, objects and tools for application development and project management. It includes bi-directional communications so developers can transfer components between the repository and their workstations, using check in-check out functions, plus version control and process management. In addition, the environment supports two different forms of code re-use, libraries and style guides. Libraries, which are user-definable, comprise windows and script modules and high level language-based forms, modules, resources and custom controls. To re-use a library object, a developer simply has to drag and drop objects from the repository into the application, Learmonth says. Style guides are defined templates and window classes with associated high level language components. According to the company, this makes interface uniformity easier to implement. Learmonth is also working on an object browser forCommon Object Repository Environment, which is expected to ship in the first quarter of 1995.

Process dependency guideline

The environment supports a range of high level languages, including tools from Powersoft Corp’s PowerBuilder, Gupta Corp’s SQL Windows, Symantec Corp’s Enterprise Developer and Microsoft Corp’s Visual Basic. On the database side it works with Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Ingres, DB/2, SQL Base and Microsoft Corp’s SQL Server and Access. It is available now for Learmonth products, but a stand-alone product designed for non-software engineering tools is planned for the future, the company says. The repository already exists within the System Engineer architecture. Meanwhile, SystemEngineer 5.2 enhancements include process dependency diagram for workflow, which models a system’s dynamic behaviour and workflow; SE/Toolkit, which enables users to develop applications that use information stored in Common Object Repository Environment and produce an interface to third party tools of their choice; and SystemEngineer/Server Builder. This provides schema generation support for developers using Microsoft Access and Watcom SQL environments. SystemEngineer 5.2 is shipping and costs UKP5,000 per user. LBMS lost its L, when Roger Learmonth stepped down as chief executive in the summer, and is only financially based in the UK. The replacement chief executive is John Bantleman, who is based in the Houston, Texas office which has, de facto, become the operational headquarters. About 50% of Learmonth’ business is done in the US, but the company says that proportion is rising and although it would like to maintain an even balance between that market and the rest of the world, it expects that the US will eventually dominate. The company had and eventful summer. One day before it announced its year-end results and a rights issue in July, a customer claimed damages of UKP15.9m on a project Learmonth had been managing. Learmonth is very touchy about these allegations, saying that nothing of legal significance has occurred: it has not even been served with a writ. The company further

claims that what should have been a private event, resolved between the two, only became a public event because of the timing. The rights issue has resulted in a consortium, led by Bessemer, gaining a 10% stake in the company: the consortium has since acquired further shares to raise its holding to 30%.