Pet Food Distributor Benefits from New IBM i Setup
February 19, 2013 Alex Woodie
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Pet Food Experts, a New England distributor of pet food supplies, has realized business process improvements as the result of an implementation of Infor‘s Distribution A+ on the IBM i platform, according to a newly published case study from IBM. Rhode Island-based PFX distributes pet food and supplies to the Northeast region of the US out of its Pennsylvania warehouse. The company employs about 250, including about 25 salespeople. Before implementing Distribution A+, Pet Food Experts (PFX) ran its business on a homegrown OS/400 application, which most recently ran on an i5 Model 520. The applications had served their purpose for 15 years, but recently they had come to resemble a “patchwork of modifications” that was inhibiting the company’s growth, Gary Jarvis, PFX’s director of information technologies, says in IBM’s case study. PFX had two main goals in updating its IT, including giving customers more accurate visibility into their orders and enabling its employees to more easily spot ways to drive greater efficiency into company operations. Both goals were ostensibly accomplished with the recent implementation of Distribution A+, an RPG-based distribution suite that was originally called Application Plus when it was developed by daly.commerce before being acquired by Infor. PFX’s implementation of Distribution A+, which was implemented by Maximum Computer Systems, has transformed the company. For starters, customers can now view their orders through a portal on its website at www.pfxne.com. Internal users at PFX have also benefited, according to Jarvis. “The latest version supports most of the functionality we need out of the box, minimizing the amount of customization work we need to do, and proving that Infor really listens to what its users want,” Jarvis says in the case study. “For example, the new Web-based GUI [graphical user interface] is incredibly user-friendly, putting point-and-click capability to the fore–which makes it ideal for our sales team to use while they are on the telephone.” To read the entire case study, which was published last month, go to www-01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/STRD-93UEP6.
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