Sand Tech's Nucleus Selected by Woolworths

Sand Technology Inc. has disclosed that Woolworths, one of the largest retailers in the United Kingdom, has chosen Nucleus, Sand's award winning set of Business Intelligence tools, as part of a complete solution to help monitor and improve its supply chain between stores and warehouses.

"We were attracted to Nucleus because of its outstanding performance and ease of use", commented Andy Hicketts, Corporate Information Systems Manager at Woolworths. "It allows us to provide detailed information to our analysts, and, unlike our previous enterprise solution, makes it much simpler, quicker and easier to obtain the information we need.

"We are using Nucleus to help us understand our supply chain performance", continued Hicketts. "Nucleus will compliment our existing data warehouse system and allow us to optimize the supply chain to all of our 781 stores nation-wide, rather than just analysing a sample number of stores as we did previously. Now we can find the optimum solution for each individual outlet."

The new system took just two months to set-up and is now running in all stores. Users in each store are able to access Nucleus and perform their own queries. "Our aim is to provide data in the hands of users, so that we are able to measure availability, understand store deliveries and improve performance. The Nucleus system seems to be meeting all these requirements and more", added Hicketts.

Duncan Painter, the general manager of Sand Technology Europe said: "The fact that Woolworths chose Nucleus when it decided to upgrade its data warehousing system proves the flexibility, durability and reliability of our product as it will have to cope with a diverse and complex number of queries on a constantly changing data set."

"Sand Technology's Nucleus Exploration suite of products, which are available for both 64-bit Unix and 32-bit Windows NT and 95/98 platforms, have picked up a succession of prestigious awards and are being increasingly recognized as 'musts' for all Business Intelligence applications", added Painter.

About Woolworths

Woolworths is the United Kingdom's "high street" chain for consumers' everyday shopping needs. It is a major retailer of toys and childrens' clothing and enjoys market-leading positions in home entertainment and confectionery. Woolworths is part of the Kingfisher group, one of Europe's largest non-food retailers, concentrating on markets centred on the home and family, with over 2,700 stores in 13 countries. It employs more than 115,000 people.

About Sand Technology

Sand Technology Inc. provides high performance, scalable software solutions for data mining, data marts, data warehouses and online analytical processing (OLAP). Sand's Nucleus product suite brings patented technology to the business user allowing for more timely and accurate decision processing within the disconnected client, desktop, workgroup, departmental and enterprise computing environments. Supporting industries like retail, finance, healthcare, transportation, telecommunication, manufacturing, government and insurance, Nucleus is used for corporate initiatives such as customer relationship management, risk analysis and management, product trend and profitability analysis, fraud detection, emerging markets, competitive analysis and quality control. Sand has commercial relationships with IBM, Oracle, Compaq Computer Corporation, Microsoft, Hitachi Data Systems, SAIC, GE, Brio Technology, Information Builders Inc., and Wyle Systems. Sand Technology can be reached on the World Wide Web at www.sandtechnology.com.