Today, in order to be more competitive, retailer groups need tools to optimize product presentation in their stores. The Merchandising application allows this. With the automatisation of manual tasks and the use of simple tools, productivity has been increased.

To remain flexible compared to the use of an owner solution, we made the choice to manage the concepts with a solution specific to the company.

This application has been integrated into a heterogeneous information system with an ETL. The ETL reduces the system complexity, as it defines a precise development framework and it hides the various technical implementations.

The more the ETL is used, the more the system complexity decreases. However, ETL requires additional tools to satisfy all our needs.

In addition, we use J2EE to implement the WEB interfaces. It is an architecture which meets our HMI needs. It allows the development of structured applications, easy to support, but the development costs generated are very high.

The WEB architecture used is based on Open Source products. There is a financial advantage in using these products as there is no licence to pay.

Stress Tests have allowed the validation of the quality of services given to the users.

The implementation of the application has satisfied the essential needs. However, some evolutions are needed in order to have tools capable of answering requests of supervision, reporting and management of data quality.

ETL, J2EE application design, architecture, Open Source, tests

I began to realise this thesis in September 2004. I worked in the Reporting and Monitoring service of the administrative department in the MONOPRIX IT Direction.

The head of the service is Jean-François Lemaire.

Pierre Audoin is the client project manager and the head of the Merchandising service.

After a reorganization of the IT Direction, at the beginning of the year 2007, the merchandising project has been moved to the Master data management service of the Merchandise department. The head of this service is Isabelle Renoncet.

After this change, I asked to join Isabelle Renoncet’s team. I continue to manage the Merchandising project in this service since April 2007.

This thesis couldn’t be done without the support of my CNAM professors, my colleagues, my friends and my family.

Among all these people, I want to express my gratitude to Mr Jacky Akoka who allows the finalisation of this thesis after nine years’ evening lessons.

I want to thank especially Pierre Audoin for his precious help and his support throughout the project as well as the software engineers who have worked with me.

I also thank Isabelle Renoncet for her demonstration of understanding since my arrival in her team.

A work so long supposes the support of friends and family. I thank my wife Xiao Ping for her help and her patience. Thanks to Léona and Roland for their encouragements.