Customer Story
Tegel Foods Ltd
100%
New Zealand raised poultry
2,300
employees
1961
company is founded
Business challenge
As a poultry supplier in New Zealand, Australia, Fiji and Samoa, Tegel Foods Ltd runs a round-the-clock system to ensure timely delivery of fresh, chilled and frozen poultry products to its customers.
Tegel uses Movex from Infor as its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, the foundation of its financial, production, logistics and sales & marketing operations, with more than 600 users. Failure to keep the supply chain running could result in considerable financial loss.
“Our operations run 24/7 to keep up with local and international demands and even short periods of downtime can have a huge impact on our business,” claims Neil Illsley, Infrastructure Manager at Tegel Foods.
“If we are unable to replenish supplies to the feed-mill in time, we can run out of feed for the birds. They then do not meet the weight targets we have for them and we don’t meet our customers’ expectations,” explains Illsley.
“Movex controls the distribution system so when it is unavailable no processed goods can be shipped. So the more time the system is up the better our distribution system performs. And the shorter the downtime (whether planned or not) the less time staff need to spend catching up on orders and supplies,” Illsley concludes.
Industry
Food Manufacturing and Distribution
Business environment
- 24/7 Poultry production, processing and distribution
- Highly regulated local and international export operations
- Complete dependence on time- critical supply chain operations
- Created a process to identify potential fraudulent behavior for bad debt recovery and fraud prevention
Solution
“I get peace of mind, with the insurance policy of knowing that we have two systems that are identical and up to date and that we can fail-over easily.”
Neil Illsley, Infrastructure Manager
Solution
SASIT, Tegel Food’s IT facilities management provider, manages its IBM Power Systems server and associated storage. Because of its mission-critical ERP system, Tegel required a high availability solution to ensure it is protected in case of a disaster. At the same time it also needed to minimise planned downtime such as during infrastructure upgrades and while performing role swap tests.
Precisely’s Assure iTERA HA was chosen for Tegel by its facilities management provider, SASIT, after it evaluated an IBM solution as well as a New Zealand homegrown solution. Tegel was very comfortable with the recommended solution as they have been a Precisely customer since 2000.
“SASIT led the way in recommending Assure iTERA as they have experienced engineers who can manage the solution for us, and the pricing was right too. Assure iTERA acts as an insurance policy for us: we know that we have high availability with our failover to the back-up site and it also enables us to easily migrate between versions of our operating system,” states Illsley.
The solution was implemented in late 2011 with support from Precisely. Although the HA solution has yet to be tested on a real outage, Tegel has already benefited tremendously. “We lease all our equipment and so every three years we get a new IBM Power System,” says Illsley.
“Upgrading using Assure iTERA HA is much easier as we can quickly wheel in a new server and set up high availability. We replicate the exisiting environment and then, in a short window, we swap over to the new box and then smoothly make the transition from the old hardware to the new,” Illsley adds.
Moreover, Tegel and SASIT were able to conduct a number of role swap tests between the primary and backup systems without affecting the production environment. SASIT has also completed a major operating system upgrade with minimal disruption to Tegel’s ERP system, and hence its operations.
Another benefit of the new system is ensuring data integrity for regulatory compliance for Tegel’s exports. “Data integrity and product traceability are key to our ability to export. Information such as when and by whom the product was manufactured has to be included; we cannot afford to lose any of this data,” says Illsley.
Assure iTERA HA has surpassed Illsley’s expectations. “I get peace of mind knowing that we have two systems that are identical and up-to-date and we that can easily fail over between them.” Illsely sees Tegel continuing its record of being a long-term Precisely customer and will be adding new solutions when SASIT recommends them.
Technologies used
- Platform: Windows, IBM i
- Applications: Movex ERP
- Database(s): Db2, SQL
- Server Types: IBM i, MS Virtualized Windows Server
- HA Software: Assure iTERA HA
Results
- Acts as an insurance policy for Tegel in the event of a disaster with an identical, up-to-date system available for failover at short notice
- Enables role swap tests between primary and backup systems without affecting the production environment or disrupting user access to the ERP system
- The high availability system reduces planned downtime enabling Tegel to easily upgrade or migrate to new hardware and operating system releases
- Minimised downtime means staff do not need manual back- up systems to manage production or the supply chain
Assure iTERA
Give your small or medium-size business the protection it needs to keep running 24/7 and eliminate the risk of lost data.