NPC Eagle Cement says its Y2K upgrade is expected to be complete next month. The Durban-based R300m-a-year company is the largest cement supplier in KwaZulu-Natal, meeting 70% of the province`s needs. Equally owned by Lafarge, PPC and Alpha, it produces 1 million tons of cement a year - 10% of South Africa`s annual consumption.
NPC Eagle Cement makes a range of cement for building and civil engineering applications, including mortar and plaster, concrete bricks, blocks and precast building units. It has factories in Durban, Port Shepstone and Newcastle.
The logistical challenge of scheduling, loading and shipping goods is handled by Option 3, a supply chain and distribution management system from Ixchange Hill Cunnington running on a uniVerse database. The system was implemented on an HP G40 server in 1990 and customised to handle NPC Eagle`s logistical and costing needs, including order tracking from initial capture through loading to monitoring of truck movements for enable efficient scheduling. It also interfaces directly with Standard Bank`s electronic funds transfer system.
Seagull Software, a Durban-based uniVerse database development specialist, is undertaking the Y2K upgrade using its own tools and trace programs. Seagull`s Dave Ball says uniVerse has always been Y2K-compliant as it stores every date as a number. The Option 3 system is largely Y2K-compliant with the exception of a number of report and month-end/year-end programs.
The progress of the Y2K upgrade project has been accelerated by the installation of a new Y2K-compliant HP 9000/D230 server from Computer Configurations. NPC Eagle`s IT manager Rob Collocott says the new server is more than twice as fast as the old HP G40.
"We`ve had positive feedback not only from the Y2K programmers, but also from the more than 120 users connected to the new server in management and marketing.
"We standardised on HP because of its reliability and have several HP servers communicating across our WAN. The speed of the new HP saves us incalculable manhours," says Collocott.
"The new HP will provide NPC Eagle with capacity to expand well into the millennium," says Jim Jeffrey, sales director of Computer Configurations.
Testing on the Y2K changes started at the end of January and should be complete by the end of next month.
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