The last thing on people's minds when they are shopping at a Giant Eagle store in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, or Maryland is technology. Yet an incredible array of hardware and software is at work behind the scenes to make their shopping experience as pleasant as possible.

There are bar code readers, electronic payment systems and electronic scanner scales to interactive kiosks (where a customer can submit an order so it's ready and waiting by the time he/she reaches the deli), cashier-less checkout lanes, and a Network Operations Center that monitors more than 210 Giant Eagle stores 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

"We're a very technology-oriented company," began John Saunders, Director of Computer Services for Giant Eagle. "There are two reasons for that: our customers demand it, and it's the only way that we're going to survive and be able to compete."

Keeping Giant Eagle stores up and running from a technology point of view is no small task.  Giant Eagle turned to Getronics for hardware support including maintenance, technology  projects, and store installations.

 "The equipment in our stores is various and sundry in terms of its age, manufacturer, type, and quantity," explained Saunders. "I'd have to call various
companies and coordinate support for point of sale systems, PCs, and scanners. We didn't have one company that could do it all. By consolidating and having Getronics handle everything, regardless of manufacturer, it just makes it much, much easier for us to get things done."

Giant Eagle had the misfortune of having lightning strike its stores in western Pennsylvania for three years in a row.  "We've had three stores take direct hits and blow out virtually everything that was plugged in.  In those kinds of situations, you have to close the doors to the public.  When that happened, I made one phone call to my Getronics manager and within an hour Getronics technicians were arriving on the scene in vans packed with replacement equipment. The most critical systems were back in just five hours and were able
to quickly reopen the store."

Saunders continued, "That's where the multi-vendor, cross-platform experience of the Getronics repair people really paid dividends.  Each person who walked into the store was intimately familiar with all of the hardware in that store. Understanding the big picture definitely helped restore systems in the shortest amount of time."

Giant Eagle's goal is to have the hardware in its stores up and running 100 percent of the time.  And the company is well on its way towards achieving that. "We have a stringent service level agreement with Getronics," explained Saunders. "There is some equipment that absolutely, positively has to be back up in four hours. And there is less critical equipment that has to be back up in 24 hours. Getronics has met those commitments better than 90% of the time."

Giant Eagle depends on Getronics both to fix and restore systems, and to track hardware related trends. These trends may not be easy to detect at first glance, but they are important for pinpointing unusual failures and identifying fixes to improve service and save money.

"The information we get from Getronics is invaluable because it's vendor-neutral.  They pass it along without any bias," says Saunders.  "Getronics does what it says it's going to do. If a Getronics technician arrives and says that he needs to take a computer down but will have it back up in 45 minutes, we believe him.  The track record is there.  What Getronics has done for Giant Eagle is given us a sense of security that the hardware maintenance and project requests in our retail stores are in good hands."

That security translates into satisfied Giant Eagle customers, and a solid foundation for growth.