TXT Retail, an Aptos Company, announced that REI Co-op has successfully implemented the TXT Retail solution for Allocation Planning across its 150 stores nationwide. REI is continuing to expand its use of TXT Retail’s merchandise lifecycle management suite with the recent selection of TXT Retail’s Assortment Planning solution that will help REI accelerate its creation of customer-focused assortments on a localized basis.　
“TXT Retail supports our ongoing efforts to deliver optimal product selection that meets the needs of our customers at each and every location where we serve them,” comments Vaidyanathan Seshan, divisional vice president of merchandising, business intelligence and analytics systems at REI. “Their solution helps us make fast, accurate merchandising and allocation decisions while providing new levels of accessibility and scalability through in-memory computing and deployment on the cloud.”
REI’s Technology team partnered with TXT Retail to support TXT Retail’s first deployment of Allocations in the AWS Cloud. The TXT Retail Allocation three-tiered application was deployed as a Microsoft Windows workload on AWS’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances running IIS, SQL and OLAP (SSRS). Security features of AWS, including EBS Volume Encryption, Security Groups and Virtual Private Cloud, are used to deliver a highly available, secure, directory aware workload.　The AWS tech stack was further leveraged using server less technologies (Lambda, AWS Aurora and AWS API Gateway) to create a near-real-time integration between TXT Retail Allocation and REI’s on-premises systems.
The configuration of the AWS infrastructure and TXT Retail workloads was validated through third party consulting and security companies to confirm the deployments are well architected to be secure, high-performing, and resilient.
“We appreciated TXT Retail’s partnership in achieving this important technology and business milestone for REI,” added Seshan. “The implementation of TXT Retail Allocation with AWS provides that unique combination of new business capability supported by advanced technology that ultimately supports REI’s goals of innovation that directly supports our Shoppers.”
