Open source data base for food group

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 17 September 2009 05:27

IT Industry - Deals

Australian producer of edible oils, fats and margarines, Peerless Foods, has deployed an open source data base from Ingres for its mission-critical business enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business intelligence (BI) platforms to assist in modernisation of its production environment and to support future expansion.

Peerless CIO, Adrian Hamilton, said Ingres was selected as the underlying database for its mission-critical business systems because it offered the “best functionality at one-sixth the price.” Hamilton said developers were equipped with the Ingres OpenROAD application development environment to build the company’s ERP system, which he estimates has saved the company between $300,000 and $400,000 a year in licensing fees.

”We needed a number of features specific to our industry, and the off the shelf products just didn't have what we needed. Developing the system delivered quite a large savings on license fees, but it also delivered more operationally.”

Hamilton said that while companies in similar situations “often go straight to proprietary vendors,” Peerless had made the decision to build its own ERP solution from the ground up.

Hamilton said his team had developed a fully featured business platform that automates every aspect of the company's business processes – from forecasting and ordering, to production, packaging, and distribution – in order to enable a highly optimised just-in-time manufacturing process.

“Ingres is appealing because it is a solid, industrial-strength database that comes at a significant cost reduction to other options. There is nothing that we could do in those applications that we can’t do in Ingres.”

According to Hamilton, Peerless has also complemented its ERP environment with the Ingres Icebreaker Business Intelligence (BI) Appliance powered by Jaspersoft, a business intelligence system that combines the Ingres database with the Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite.

“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.

“The Ingres-based application environment has enriched our developers' job satisfaction. Rather than just figuring out how to get a bundled package to do what we need, they can go from start to finish with a project and put their intellectual property into the business.”

Hamilton also said that “having open source at a database level promotes innovation – and we can innovate at a database level as opposed to spending thousands of dollars on individual tools. Whatever we want to do, we can just do it.”

Ingres VP of sales and service for Australia and New Zealand, Jason Leonidas, said Peerless Foods was “perfect example of an organisation leveraging the benefits of the New Economics of IT.

According to Leonidas, more and more customers are embracing an open alternative to proprietary software stacks, “understanding that open source provides flexibility and innovation at a significantly lower cost than proprietary solutions like Oracle.”