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Peerless Foods Eyes Substantial Savings with Ingres Database
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage
- Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Food & Beverage
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Logistics & Transportation
Use Cases
- Inventory Management
- Predictive Maintenance
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
The Challenge
With its business growing, Peerless needed a more consistent, flexible platform to modernize its production environment and support future expansion. The company began exploring commercial off-the-shelf enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and underlying databases. While companies in similar situations often go straight to proprietary vendors, Peerless decided to build its own ERP solution from the ground up. With a team of just a half-dozen developers, Hamilton’s department set out to develop a fully featured business platform that would automate every aspect of the company’s business processes – from forecasting and ordering, to production, packaging, and distribution – in order to enable a highly optimized just-in-time manufacturing process. To support this environment, Peerless required a flexible, scalable database environment that would be easy for developers to optimize around the evolving ERP platform.
About The Customer
Established in 1984, Peerless Foods has grown to become Australia’s largest producer of edible oils, fats and margarines. Peerless chose Ingres as the platform to build a custom Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application. In addition to being able to manage and automate every aspect of their planning, production and distribution, Peerless saved between $300,000 to $400,000 per year in licensing fees.
The Solution
After evaluating a range of proprietary and open-source solutions, Peerless decided that Ingres Database offered the best functionality at one-sixth the price. Ingres was selected as the underlying database for its mission-critical business systems. Developers were equipped with the Ingres OpenROAD application development environment to build its ERP system. By the time the application was completed, it was clear that Ingres Database had been the best choice for the project. Hamilton estimates the company has saved between $300,000 to $400,000 a year in licensing fees by using its own code. More recently, Peerless has complemented its ERP environment with the Ingres Icebreaker Business Intelligence (BI) Appliance, a comprehensive business intelligence system that combines the Ingres database with the Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite. For Peerless, the result has been a comprehensive analytical suite that is being used by two dozen business managers for a range of production, forecasting, planning and sales analysis that will help the business run even more efficiently.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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