Spar Group central-office in Pinetown, KwaZulu-Natal has extended its service contract with TCM.
Spar Group technology and operations manager Keith Dromgool explained that TCM was initially chosen to provide services over five years ago covering AS/400 hardware support. Spar`s core distribution business systems run on IBM AS/400 computers.
"We have now extended TCM`s support services to include AS/400 software and operating environment. The additional services have been enabled by a permanent online connection from TCM to the Spar national network. Spar has distribution centres in Durban, PE, Johannesburg and Cape Town. Geographically, TCM also has offices in these centres where support is provided," he explained.
"In extending the contract, we were looking for consistency, national coverage and a level of expertise that would assist us with integration and software support," he added.
"We were not merely looking for a products supplier, but rather a company able to provide national service as well as add value to Spar`s IT operation. The service needed to be tailored to meet our specific requirements."
Spar has now introduced a unique mobile disaster recovery system. "We use a fully configured AS/400 server from TCM that can be shipped to any business unit around the country, enabling them to become operational within hours. It is simply sent by air to the required location. Users are able to begin working straight after downloading the backup data," he added.
The disaster recovery machine is kept current with the latest Spar production system, mirroring all head-office and regional AS/400 applications.
TCM also utilises its locally developed TCMECS SMS support software to trigger alerts to TCM technical staff as well as Spar staff, advising them of system errors or actions that need to be taken.
Spar utilises the performance tool Snapshot/400 which provides TCM and Spar management with a view of system performance.
"Snapshot allows us, at a region or from central-office to access group AS/400s and view graphical reports covering the overall performance of the system and workloads," said Dromgool.
"Recently, with TCM`s assistance, we were able to resolve a performance issue in one of our regions that, from our experience, other suppliers would automatically have recommend an immediate hardware upgrade.
"TCM did an analysis of the situation and rectified the problem through some software changes, allowing Spar to defer upgrades that would have cost hundreds of thousands of rands," he noted.
Dromgool said the support requirements within Spar have changed over the years. "We are finding that the majority of our needs now cover technical support for integration. TCM has moved its focus towards the integration of existing and new hardware and software applications, especially in terms of our network environment."
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