Eastern Equities owns two transport companies; Farmers Transport and Rapid-Road Freighters. The group employs around 450 staff, spread between 20 offices around New Zealand. All of the finance, IT, HR and other back-office functions are operated out of the Hastings office.

Eastern Equities runs the financial side of its operations and manages its vehicle fleets with a Baan ERP system. Around 140 staff throughout the company regularly use the system, which until earlier this year was running on a Sun Solaris server.

“But the Sun server wasn’t cutting the mustard and wasn’t allowing staff to fully exploit the potential of the ERP system”, says Eastern Equities IT manager Nick Cooley.

According to Cooley the Sun server couldn’t handle any more than 100 concurrent ERP users, and when it got close to that limit performance was suffering. “It was starting to get pretty creaky round the edges,” he says.

To run management and KPI reports required a lot of processing power, so data had to be extracted from the ERP system and put into a SQL server data warehouse. “We were doing this over the weekend because of the strain it was putting on the Sun server,” says Cooley.

“But by Friday, the data we had processed the previous weekend to generate reports was totally out of date. We were getting to the stage where we could not get our reports out of the system because of the pressure it was putting on the server. We lived with it for a few years because we knew no better.”

To cap it all off the Sun server was five years old and due for replacement. Originally Cooley was looking at a more powerful Sun server, but after attending an SSA business seminar (SSA had taken over the management of Baan) where IBM presented, he benchmarked a Sun server with the equivalent IBM product.

“The price performance ratio blew Sun out of the water,” Cooley says. “IBM is a business partner of SSA and they have had a major realignment of their prices.”

With the package deal that Eastern Equities was able to negotiate with IBM, Cooley found he could get two IBM servers for the same price as one Sun server. This allowed the company to mitigate its business risk by having a spare server in case the first one failed.

More power means easier reporting
Having a more powerful server to run its ERP system has changed the way Eastern Equities staff work. For example, generating KPI and management reports has become significantly easier. “A process that used to take about five hours on a Saturday now takes about an hour during the week,” says Cooley.

Meanwhile standard ERP reports can now be generated in a matter of minutes, as opposed to two to three hours with the old server. And because staff can run reports out of the ERP system at any time, the company now has access to real-time data, giving it an up-to-the-minute view of its business.

“Invoices can now be generated at any time, whereas previously we did invoicing once a week and scheduled it as an overnight job.” Because the IBM server can handle much higher loads, Eastern Equities can run more EXoperations outside of its ERP system in a realtime environment.

“We were running a small in-house planning application that enables the guys to plan the movement of trucks around the country”, says Cooley. “We weren’t running that on the ERP system because of too much load on the server but now we can run it concurrently and in real time.”

The new server has also given Eastern Equities a lot more data storage capacity. “We only had another twelve months data capacity left with Sun, but now we’ve got ten years capacity.”

Cooley says the installation of the IBM hardware took about a day and went without a hitch, and this allowed Eastern Equities’ IT staff more time to make the adjustment from Solaris to AIX, IBM’s implementation of UNIX.

At the time of writing, the iSeries servers had been operational for 52 days, and according to Cooley, he hasn’t had to reboot it or put in one service support call. The Sun equipment, by contrast, was getting rebooted every week, and tended to get slower and slower towards the end of the week.”

The bottom line, says Cooley, is that the IBM machines were faster, had more growth capacity and having two servers mitigates against hardware failure. “Plus the price was good,” he says.

For more information
www.ibm.com/nz

Gary Elmes
IBM software marketing manager
09 359 2679
locutus@nz.ibm.com

December 2005