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Information source: IBM Web page Original under: http://www2.software.ibm.com/casestudies/swcs.nsf/customername/CC93BB53A49E5E480025672C000779CA
a Leg Up on the Snack Pack keep doing business the way we do it best." its way through $15.1 billion worth of snack foods a year, snack makers scramble to maintain lucrative shelf space for their products. Frito-Lay, manufacturer of some of the best-selling snack brands in the United States--such as Fritos, Doritos and Lay's--has refined sales and distribution to an art. Its automated Route Sales System is based on handheld input devices linked to IBM DB2 for OS/2 databases in distribution centers nationwide. DB2 also lies at the heart of a newly upgraded Expert Advisor help desk application. Frito-Lay help desk analysts use this DB2 for AIX-based application to help the company's salespeople keep their handheld devices humming and help other employees troubleshoot everything from Pcs to production systems. billion worth of snack foods each year and enjoys one of the highest operating margins among food product companies. One of the keys to Frito-Lay's success lies in its sales and distribution strategy, as George Wensowitch, group manager for database management, explains: "We're unique among manufacturers and distributors in that we're a direct store delivery (DSD) company. Merchandisers go into every store, stock and service the shelves and generate new sales of products nearly every time they're in the store. This is what has made us famous--we deliver fresh product with a 30-day shelf life and a guarantee to accept unsold product from the customer. The salespeople keep a good mix in the stores, they know what sells, and they keep the shelf looking clean and fresh." number of transactions than delivery to a central warehouse. Today, Frito-Lay's DSD system generates thousands of invoices daily, with numerous line items and totals ranging anywhere from a few dollars to thousands of dollars. transactions could be done on paper. When Frito and Lay merged in 1961, they centralized their accounting processes and had clerks process the transactions as they arrived by mail, eventually using OCR technology to scan the data into the accounts receivable database. As the business grew and Frito-Lay expanded to all 50 states, the volume became overwhelming. When, in the mid '80s, the company found itself employing several hundred clerks to process the paperwork, it was clear that it needed a better solution. process."It got pretty tough in the mid '80s," Wensowitch explains. "As regional competition heated up, we began to regionally price our products. Every time we changed prices, we had to print and distribute new forms. It became unmanageable, and we became inefficient at doing what we had been doing so well for so long." electronic sales processing device. This is a lightweight, portable computer that can be used for order entry, route sales accounting and sales ticket generation. It also keeps track of inventory for the route salesperson. original IBM 8100 servers were replaced by OS/2 servers. The main data repositories at headquarters, which were originally a combination of IMS files and DB2 databases, are gradually being migrated to DB2 databases. "We've kept the database model as it was," says DBA manager Chris Swartz, "but we've added a lot of functionality and migrated more and more to DB2." automation system. When reporting to one of the company's 200 distribution centers, a salesperson inserts the handheld unit into a CIU (communications interface unit), which is linked to a telecommunications client--typically an IBM 750 running OS/2. The client is connected via optical interface to an OS/2 server, which then shunts data over a Frame Relay wide area network to the mainframe at headquarters. Information on customers, products, promotions and sales routes are downloaded from the server, and new orders, sales tickets and daily reports are uploaded. An uploading/downloading session usually takes two to three minutes. performance because of the large number of transactions the company processes. Pricing also influenced their decision. However, the major factor in favor of DB2 for OS/2 was its ties to the other DB2 products, particularly, the fact that Frito-Lay was able to leverage the skills of the programmers and analysts who had worked with DB2 on the company's mainframe. "We were already heavily steeped in IMS and DB2 on the mainframe for a number of years," Swartz says. "We saw many potential advantages in staying with the family and running DB2 for OS/2. In the future, it would give us the option to choose from a family of products to support whatever platform we decided to deploy. We also believed that if there were problems down the line, they could be worked out better with a single vendor." "We saw many potential advantages in staying with the family and running DB2 for OS/2. In the future, it would give us the option to choose from a family of products to support whatever platform we decided to deploy." immediate problems, but by a proactive assessment of the company's needs for the future. Frito-Lay has been able to maintain a healthy growth rate, with manageable operating costs, by keeping its data centralized, and its operations decentralized. With DB2 for OS/2, the company can send large volumes of data back and forth, while keeping the client, server databases and master files in sync. Frito-Lay can create subsets of the database that are appropriate for individual salespeople and send those subsets to them in a timely manner. "We can practice more just-in-time decision making," Swartz says. "We react quickly to what we see in the marketplace; we don't need a long business cycle to implement new procedures at the individual sales route level." keep doing business the way we do it best, with that one-on-one connection between the salesperson and the store manager or owner," adds Wensowitch. maintain a distributed environment without having technical staff at each site. "We want the people there to sell chips and manage the inventory, and not to have to understand how to manage a local area network. That's been a fundamental strategic point for us throughout the development of this project. We stayed with the IBM suite of products and with DB2 for OS/2 as the database manager because it met those needs." facilities, Frito-Lay maintains a corporate help desk, staffed by analysts who respond to problems concerning everything from the salespeople's handheld devices to PCs to manufacturing systems. Their primary tool is Expert Advisor, a help desk software package from Software Artistry (Indianapolis, IN). Expert Advisor helps users track problems and their respective solutions, and contains a "common problem" database, which provides quick solutions to the most frequently encountered problems. called in, and they need to access the Expert Advisor system to monitor their work on various problems, ensure timely resolution and document the resolution. did not have the capacity to accommodate both the SEs and the help desk analysts. SEs would have to beg an Expert Advisor seat from one of the analysts. NetBios and LanServer as the communication protocols and Oracle as the Expert Advisor database. "That hardware/software combination restricted us to 60 seats," Swartz explains. "There were no more system resources to support any add-ons." Swartz, replacing the operating system or the communications protocols was not an option. That left the hardware or the database management system. "We knew that we had maxed out the hardware platform and we needed to move to the UNIX environment to have room for expansion in the future. The question became: 'Do we move Oracle across to UNIX or do we look at DB2 for AIX? With DB2 for AIX there was a price advantage, and the ability to leverage our skill set. I've got people who are already familiar with the DB2 family, so it's much easier to add another sibling to the family than build up the experience in Oracle." better long term strategic decision than staying with DB2 on OS/2, especially since the department expected to add 300 new users in the near future. "We picked the RS/6000 AIX platform because it was so scalable," he says. that the system has been running fine ever since, and the help desk analysts have commented on the increased speed of the application. "The SEs appreciate being able to sign on whenever they want," he says. "The new platform will allow us to scale to 1,000 users over time, so we feel comfortable that we're poised for future growth." Representative, IBM Business Partner or IBM Direct at: 1 800 IBM-CALL For information faxed direct to your location: 1 800 IBM-4FAX Visit our Website at http://www.software.ibm.com/data IBM is the registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation. IBM company product and service names are trademarks or registered trademarks of IBM. Other company, product or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. International Business Machines Corporation 1997. |
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