With an annual turnover of $60 million, Nelson-headquartered The New Zealand King Salmon Company produces 40% of the world’s farmed king salmon. Smolt (baby salmon) are reared at hatcheries near Takaka and Southbridge before being transferred to one of King Salmon’s four Marlborough Sounds sea-farms.

Each hatchery site has three staff members who are equipped with PCs but until recently they were struggling with dial-up connections over an ageing rural landline network.

Sending emails and accessing business systems from Nelson was a very slow and frustrating experience, says King Salmon’s IT manager Steve Comerford.

“They were not getting anywhere near 56K modem speeds. Connection speeds were also very inconsistent, which irritated staff even more.”

Worst of all, because of electrified fences near the hatcheries, staff would routinely be disconnected.

“They’d get three-quarters of the way through sending a large spreadsheet and get kicked off so would have to send the whole thing again,” says Comerford.

Hatchery staff were spending far too long trying to communicate with head office. “It didn’t fit with the company’s values of encouraging the full potential of our people,” says Comerford.

King Salmon decided to look at its options. Both hatcheries were located too far from the closest telephone exchanges for a DSL connection to be a go-er. Getting data connections over Telecom or Vodafone’s mobile networks was also not an option as mobile coverage at the Southbridge site was virtually non-existent.

One option King Salmon did look at, for its Takaka site, was using a local wireless provider. But there was no line of sight between the hatchery and the nearest radio mast. The company would have had to put up a new mast and also negotiate with the landowner on whose property the mast would have been located.

The only remaining option was satellite. So the company approached ICONZ, an internet service provider which specialises in providing tailored internet solutions for businesses.

ICONZ offers a full range of connectivity options including dial-up, DSL, frame relay, fibre optic and fixed wireless connections, as well as web and server hosting and managed security services. 

ICONZ's X-Terrestrial satellite is a high-speed two-way internet service which is available virtually anywhere in New Zealand and is capable of providing a connection speed up to 8Mbps.

King Salmon went for a 256 Kbps satellite connection, which Comerford says will pay for itself within two years. Each dish cost $2,000 and with installation costs the total upfront outlay was $7,300 for both sites.

“Previously we were spending about $350 a month in data charges for the Takaka site alone,” says Comerford.

A business case to justify the new system showed that King Salmon would recoup its set-up costs through savings on data charges in 17 months, he says. And this didn’t take into account the productivity gains resulting from improved communications.

“But it wasn’t all about cost savings,” says Comerford. “It was about getting the full potential out of our staff.”

Hatchery staff now have easy access to King Salmon’s Nelson-based email server. They are also able to access the company’s enterprise resource planning and business intelligence systems.

“They can quickly and easily update inventory records and raise purchase orders where previously this was a very time-consuming process,” says Comerford.

The ICONZ satellite connection has allowed King Salmon to roll out its Hyperion business intelligence product to staff at the hatcheries.

“This empowers them to do their own analysis, develop their own reports and get information when they want it,” says Comerford.

Time is also saved through hatchery staff not having to continually log on and off, because, unlike the dial-up connection, the satellite connection is always on.    

King Salmon’s satellite connection has been up and running for three months now, and Comerford says the installation went very smoothly and there have been no performance issues to date.

The bottom line is that satellite connectivity saves costs and improves productivity through time savings and giving hatchery staff the same level of access to company data and systems as head office staff. 

“It supports our company’s strategy of getting good information systems to our remote locations, and it increase the performance of our people,” says Comerford.

For more information

King Salmon
www.kingsalmon.co.nz

ICONZ
sales@iconz.net
www.iconz.co.nz

October 2005