Britain's fourth largest supermarket chain, Morrisons has posted very impressive sales figures this quarter and is currently winning the battle with rivals Tesco and Waitrose.

On the back of this performance (up 8% on last year), Morrisons have just announced the £223 million purchase of 38 stores from the Co-operative Group.  The deal will be its biggest since the £2 billion takeover of Safeway four years ago and should the deal go through, it faces not only the challenge of refurbishing stores but of integrating IT infrastructures.

Morrisons have reputedly earmarked a budget of £98 million to cover the costs of refurbishing stores and integrating IT systems.  This is in addition to the £110 million project underway to migrate to Oracle systems.  These include, Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, Oracle Identity Management and the Fusion and SOA middleware applications.   Payroll and HR systems are expected first with other Oracle Systems to be rolled out over the next two years.  

In this case and somewhat fortuitously, the Co-Operative Group already has a developed Oracle software strategy in place and this should lead to a far easier and less painful integration path.

Morrisons believe its competitive pricing, store improvements and IT strategy has led to its impressive performance and is why it claims to be attracting 700,000 new customers each week with a sales growth rate four times that of rival Tesco!