The focus of CSK Auto’s Portal Strategy is the integration of personnel, business processes, information, and applications. The company needed a way to provide managers and executives with flexible and customizable views of the company’s key performance indicators. CSK selected IBM’s WebSphere Portal software as the platform for the project. This ambitious technology goal also required portal experts to design, install, configure and develop the vision. To accomplish this, CSK Auto selected Isos Technology as their portal experts to exploit Isos’ portal knowledge to help ensure the project’s success.

Business Needs
The key requirements of the solution beyond the portal design, installation, and configuration was the need for a variety of charts and graphical layouts. These views require frameworks to provide the ability to enhance the portal with geographical maps, charts and gauges. In addition, there was a requirement for portlets to provide access, within the same user session, to enterprise application running on various servers. Each of these portlets needed to be cooperative and responsive to each other when changes occur.

Isos Technology - Simplifying the View
Among the most impressive pieces of functionality built into CSK’s portal is the ability for any manager to request real time sales information across the entire company and then drill down by organizational units (Division, Region, District and Stores). At the same time, managers can track inventory without needing to open up a new terminal window or browser with a separate login to gather critical information. Isos consultants exercised their expertise with open-source Java frameworks along with their portal experience to provide this functionality. This level of functionality helps a large company like CSK Auto become more responsive and efficient.

“Isos Technology provided consultants with the abilities needed to address the complexities that come with any progressive technical endeavor. Their consultants supplied more than just development expertise; they were integral during the whole life cycle, from installation to deployment of our portal environment. When portal fix-packs were required, the Isos consultants worked closely with IBM to make sure our project remained on track. The Isos team was paramount to the success of our Enterprise portal project.”

- Mike Amidei, Vice President of Information Systems

Benefits To CSK
So what has CSK Auto achieved? A much simpler, integrated work environment with access to applications through a single user interface, an integrated work environment without concern for the complexities of back-end integration; improved knowledge sharing and employee productivity. The portal application has provided CSK’s managers the flexibility to customize their view of daily sales information along with access to third party portlets that give them regional weather, maps, news, and stock quotes.

“The overall goal was to create a portal that would allow managers to see different views of sales data in a flexible and customizable way. This is what we’ve accomplished using IBM’s Portal Software. Our managers now have instant access to real-time sales numbers from the current hour, week, month, year… they define their view. These ranges can be displayed by company, division, region, district or individual store.“

“The impressive part is that my managers can get these numbers in various layouts using online geographically maps, charts, tables, and gauges. It has really changed the way we conceptualize our sales numbers.”
- Mike Amidei, Vice President of Information Systems

CSK Auto, Inc
CSK Auto, Inc. owns and operates 1,273 retail auto parts stores in 22 states under the brand names Checker Auto Parts, Schuck's Auto Supply, Kragen Auto Parts, and Murray's Discount Auto Stores.

www.cskauto.com

Key Components:

• Platform: Dell load balanced servers running SUSE Linux 9.3
• IBM 570 iSeries Database ServerI
• IBM WebSphere Portal 5.1.0.3
• Java Frameworks: Spring, Hibernate, Velocity, log4j, Quartz and Jakarta Commons
• JSR 168 Portlet Specification
• WSADMIN Scripts: Application Server Automation.