Infrastructure company Datacentrix has completed an award-winning installation of HP`s suite of OpenView network management tools at Genfood Industries Ltd and its 96 sites nationwide. The R2,5 million installation netted Datacentrix the HP OpenView partner of the year award from Hewlett Packard, which will be presented at a function in Spain in May.
Genfood group IT manager, Charl Joubert, revealed that OpenView is part of a new R31 million network infrastructure which replaced the stand-alone systems at each mill, bakery and depot. "By standardising our NT system on HP hardware and management software, integrating the systems and training up users have taken Genfoods only 10 months. In effect, we have installed a complete MRP system in less than a year - something unheard of in the supply chain business."
The tools will manage a Wintel network, connected to 15 HP quad-processor systems at Genfoods` Parktown centre running AccPac and Microsoft office software.
The manufacturer of Blue Ribbon bread, Snowflake flour, Anchor yeast, as well as 288 000 buns per day for Macdonald`s fast foods, will use HP OpenView for a number of applications:
Tracking of physical network devices to component level to guard against theft of hardware components
Automated software distribution, remote user enablement and remote control of desktop systems
Management reporting through Microsoft Back Office to regional level
Fully automated help desk to monitor service level agreements, action escalation and service management
Physical asset management, including depreciation calculations.
Genfoods now has a network that ensures that efficiencies are extended throughout its business, irrespective of geographical location. "An example of the benefits of such a system can be seen in our pricing structure," Joubert explains. "This is a complex multilayer system in which a customer may be priced individually and/or in two different grouping systems, for any number of date ranges. The best price for that customer, for that product, for that day can be calculated. Human intervention, therefore, is minimised, and efficiencies maximised."
It was important to plan a configuration that would deliver a high level of automation and remote functionality, because of the distributed nature of Genfoods` business. "With operations in remote areas such as Louis Trichardt, Lesotho and Swaziland, we needed a system that was easy to use, but that possessed full functionality and could be managed from our Parktown centre," says Joubert. "Accpac gave us 90% of the functionality we needed; there are abundant NT skills available to maintain the Microsoft platform, and the HP configuration gave us the remote management and automation that we needed to keep our costs low."
Datacentrix played a key role in designing the network and managing its roll-out. "Our strength lies in large-scale rollouts involving multiple sites and hundreds of users," says Datacentrix director Klaas Lammers. "We are implementation partners of both Microsoft and HP, which means that this type of implementation lies firmly within our scope of expertise."
Genfoods is currently investigating an e-business initiative with its retailing partners.
Share