Sears Wins NCSA's 1998 Grand Challenge Award
for Breakthroughs in Knowledge Management
ACTION ITEMS
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign presented Sears, Roebuck and Co. with the 1998 Industrial Grand Challenge Award on April 29, in an awards presentation at the U. of I. Assembly Hall, 1800 S. First St., Champaign.
The award recognizes Sears for its use of high-performance information technology tools to make competitive breakthroughs in knowledge management.
The annual award was established by NCSA in 1992 to honor the corporation that accomplished a major competitive breakthrough during the previous year as a result of its partnership with NCSA. A key part of NCSA's mission is to help improve the competitiveness of U.S. industry. Sears is one of 15 Fortune 500 corporations partnering with NCSA to preview emerging technologies and their uses in the corporate sector.
The 1998 award recognizes the efforts of Greg Miller, project manager, and Steve Wyatt, corporate investigations analyst, and their team at Sears headquarters in Hoffman Estates, Ill.
Through its partnership with NCSA, Sears has developed new database management techniques, which allow the company's Asset Protection group to quickly analyze vast amounts of point-of-sale data for exceptions to normal transactions. This analysis permits the retailer to identify opportunities to reduce costs associated with incorrect point-of-sale procedures and fraudulent transactions.
"One of the competencies that retailers need as they move into the 21st century is the ability to manipulate, mine and understand very large databases," said Joseph Smialowski, Sears senior vice president and chief information officer. "It is a competency that is key to understanding how to more appropriately assort, develop more effective advertising and promotional efforts, and better schedule staff within our stores.
"Our partnership with NCSA has resulted in our learning how we can organize and analyze massive amounts of data so that it becomes actionable information with bottom-line impact," Smialowski added.
Larry Smarr, director of NCSA and the National Computational Science Alliance, said the award recognizes a model partnership in the NCSA Industrial program. "Sears' top management has worked very closely with us in setting goals for their application work, and they have helped us adjust our direction as unknowns became known variables. The Sears team and NCSA's technical team have worked in harmony to achieve these technological breakthroughs. There has been a wonderful spirit of cooperation and innovation."