iSeries-to-Windows Conversion Successful at Admiral Beverage

Published: June 17, 2008

by Alex Woodie

When Admiral Beverage migrated its JD Edwards software from the iSeries to a Windows-based xSeries solution, it was left in a quandary over what to do with its ACOM Solutions document and payment management software, which also ran on the OS/400 server. The solution? Admiral found that the Windows versions of ACOM's software ran just as well as the OS/400 version.

Admiral Beverage is a Pepsi distributor that was founded in Wyoming in 1947. Since then, the company has grown tremendously, and now employs more than 1,200 people in 30 facilities across seven states. An iSeries-based JD Edwards ERP solution from Oracle had guided the company through its growth in recent years.

At some point, the company decided to migrate its JD Edwards software to the Windows Server operating system running on an IBM xSeries server, and the migration commenced in early 2008. While the JD Edwards ERP system is at the heart of Admiral Beverages' IT department, the company relied on several other OS/400-based packages to run its business, including accounting software, routing software, and the ACOM document management and automated payment software.

Admiral Beverage used ACOM's OS/400-based software for years, but it wasn't going to automatically choose ACOM to provide software for its new Windows infrastructure, says the company's IT director Jim Hill. "We took the opportunity to review our choices, using our own resources and a consultant," he says.

In the end, Admiral did pick ACOM. "We settled on the Windows versions of EZPayManager and EZeDocs solutions based on our long-standing satisfaction with the products' performance on the iSeries, where they ran transparently, and on the fact that the competing solution cost far more for similar features and performance," Hill says.

Today, ACOM's software is used to cut more than 6,000 checks per month at Admiral Beverage, while the automated clearinghouse (ACH) is used to make payments electronically.

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