Clark Cotton, the foremost player in the South African cotton ginning industry has recently hailed Pick Systems Africa`s database software as a best of breed system.
Clark Cotton has invested around R1 million into upgrading its custom written system. The upgrade took just 6 months to complete including installation of new hardware, software and user training.
Says Ahmed Badat, systems manager at Clark Cotton: "Clark Cotton needed to integrate information from the approximately 51 000 large and small-scale farmers situated in South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, Namibia, Botswana and Mozambique, from whom it purchases its raw cotton. The flexibility and increased capabilities of the Pick Systems database not only allowed Clark Cotton to upgrade the system according to their needs but also to reduce delays in retrieving information from all of the Ginneries, depots and De-lint processing plants.
"The system has proved very stable and scaleable. We have been using Pick`s database systems since 1985 without experiencing any major problems. Moreover, we are already seeing the rewards of the upgrade," says Badat. "Data retrieval speeds have increased continuously with each successive upgrade from R83 to AP Pro and now with D3" The Pick system runs on a wide area network (WAN) on 15 Compaq and IBM servers running D3 for NT.
Clark Cotton supports its entire cotton purchasing control system on the Pick D3 database that has been customised to provide information on stock, rainfall and other statistics within seconds.
The Clark Cotton system maintains data on its servers for nearly 51 000 farmers and has approximately 150 users. This requires a sophisticated debtors, purchasing- and stock control system and supplies valuable input to farmers. The Pick system is well suited for this kind of application and can handle several hundreds of thousands of items.
The Pick system allows quick and various ways of retrieving and presenting data such as cotton production averages, weather conditions, farmers` progress and inventory maintenance of the 300 000 bales of cotton sold last year.
At the moment, Zambia is the only stand-alone site; all the other sites are directly connected via the WAN. Farmers get instantaneous feedback from the Clark Cotton technicians on their performance and receive online database management support.
The benefits of having the system on a WAN makes support of sites much easier, travel time of the technicians to each site is greatly reduced as Clark Cotton can now provide online site support.
"The system is farmer-centric. We have to take care of our farmers. A farmer lost today is a loss to our business," concludes Badat
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Clark Cotton J.L
Clark Cotton Company (Pty) Limited was incorporated in 1954 and became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Premier Group in 1976. OTK acquired Clark Cotton as a going concern in 1 November 1998.
Clark Cotton operates a substantial number of Ginneries and De-linting plants in South Africa, Botswana, Swaziland, Namibia, Zambia and Mozambique. In 1999 it processed 300 000 bales of cotton from its network of farmers.
Cotton production in southern Africa has become of more importance to the farming industry as it acts as a hedge against low international maize and wheat prices.
Pick Systems Africa
Pick Systems Africa is a wholly owned subsidiary of Pick Systems Inc., based in Irvine, California. Pick Systems is a leading developer of multi-user, multi-value database management system (DBMS) software. A pioneer in the industry, the Company introduced its first multi-value DBMS in 1973. Pick Systems markets its database solutions worldwide through a network of more than 250 value-added resellers supporting 2,000 VAR-developed applications. Pick Systems` primary markets, served through the Company`s network of VARs developing industry-specific vertical applications, are: manufacturing, distribution, medical, financial services and wholesale/retail.