Case Study Highlights
- Industry: Food Retail & Service
- Years of Experience: Over 50 years
- Technology Legacy: IBM i
- Core Operations:
- Retail grocery stores
- Quick-service restaurants
- Production and distribution
- Operational Focus: Real-time store data access, proactive performance optimization, and mobile-enabled maintenance
- Technology Approach: Phased IBM i futurization with Profound AppDev, leveraging coexistence, rapid UI transformation, and centralized access
About: Company Profile
A vertically integrated food retail company with over 50 years in business operates farming, processing, distribution, and retail operations across hundreds of store locations.
As a company committed to delivering freshness and operational excellence, this organization recognized the need to equip its field and maintenance teams with technology that delivers real-time insights and futurized workflows.
Their journey toward AI-enhanced transformation began with Profound Logic, the only IBM i technology partner offering a complete path beyond modernization, into futurization.
Challenge
To remain agile in a high-volume, customer-centric environment, this company needed to overcome several operational bottlenecks. With hundreds of locations relying on fast, accurate data and seamless equipment performance, even minor delays in information flow or maintenance could impact profitability and customer satisfaction.
The company’s legacy systems, while reliable, lacked the speed, flexibility, and accessibility required to support real-time decision-making and responsive store support.
Leadership knew that to stay ahead, they needed to move beyond incremental modernization and embrace a more forward-looking strategy, one rooted in long-term adaptability and intelligent infrastructure. They turned to Profound Logic to help accelerate their evolution from traditional workflows to a futurized, insight-driven operation built for continuous improvement.
The Solution
he company selected the Profound AppDev suite to drive its initial phase of futurization, focusing on tools that would provide rapid results while building a foundation for continued evolution.
Genie was used to instantly transform green-screen applications into modern web interfaces, without altering underlying RPG or COBOL code. This preserved business continuity while improving usability across operational and maintenance functions.
Atrium served as the unified access layer, giving District and Area Managers role-based dashboards and centralized visibility into store-level performance.
These tools, delivered through Profound Logic’s unique coexistence model, allowed the company to futurize incrementally and set the stage for future AI-powered enhancements.
Implementation
The company took a deliberate, phased approach to futurization, prioritizing agility, minimal disruption, and immediate value. Rather than rip and replace, they chose to enhance and extend their existing IBM i systems with Profound AppDev’s coexistence model. This allowed legacy and modern applications to function in parallel, preserving critical business logic while unlocking new capabilities.
Store-Level Insight Futurized
Through Atrium, District and Area Managers were given instant access to performance metrics across multiple store locations. This visibility empowered them to shift from reactive management to proactive optimization. With a modern, browser-based interface and role-based access, managers could focus on the right data at the right time, without relying on IT for access or reports.
Maintenance Workflow Transformation
With Genie, maintenance employees were able to report part purchases and usage from the field in real time, eliminating guesswork and delays. These transformed workflows ensured that technicians could quickly locate necessary parts and expedite repairs. By digitizing and streamlining this critical process, the company improved equipment uptime and reduced manual reporting errors, ultimately enhancing operational continuity.
This dual-focus implementation not only delivered quick wins but also laid the groundwork for deeper transformation through AI-enhanced capabilities and intelligent process automation.
Tangible Results
With Profound AppDev as the enabler, the company unlocked immediate and long-term benefits from its futurization strategy:
- Reduced Operational Costs: Real-time visibility cut support inefficiencies and lowered management overhead
- Improved Profitability: Store managers made quicker, smarter decisions using live performance data
- Faster Equipment Repairs: Technicians located and utilized parts efficiently, minimizing downtime
- Foundation for AI Integration: The successful rollout created a clear, phased path for expanding into future AI-powered capabilities using Profound AI
Conclusion
This company’s engagement illustrates what it means to futurize, to move with purpose beyond surface-level modernization and into strategic, scalable transformation. With Profound AppDev, the company didn’t just modernize interfaces; they unlocked operational intelligence, empowered their teams with real-time data, and established real futurization.
Thanks to our unique coexistence model, the company achieved measurable gains without sacrificing stability or uptime. Their maintenance teams now operate with speed and precision, and their field managers are equipped with the insights they need to lead more effectively.
But this isn’t the end of their transformation, it’s the beginning. With tools like Profound API and CoderFlow ready to integrate, the company is now positioned to explore intelligent automation, predictive analytics, and natural language interaction across their enterprise systems. They’re not just adapting to change, they’re building for what’s next.
Start Your Futurization Journey
Profound Logic empowers IBM i businesses like this one to move beyond modernization and into a future built on intelligence, speed, and seamless coexistence.
Ready to transform your operations? Contact our team at Futurization@ProfoundLogic.com or explore what’s possible with Profound AppDev: https://www.profoundlogic.com/profound-appdev/.