Newly centralized data processing relies on the Robot Products

For over 30 years, Tree of Life has provided retailers throughout the United States, the Caribbean, and now Canada, with the products, services and the marketing edge that adds to their bottom line. As the nation’s leading distributor of natural, organic, specialty, ethnic, and gourmet food products, Tree of Life has helped thousands of retailers, from the smallest independent stores to the largest supermarket chains, meet the constantly growing demand for products that help Americans to “live well.”

In the data center at company headquarters in St. Augustine, Florida, John Kinnaird, National Operating Center Manager, is responsible for supporting both hardware and software for their IBM System i. John notes that there’s been a great deal of change in how IT is set up and run at Tree of Life since he was hired. “When I started working for Tree Of Life about seven years ago, everything was decentralized. Each of our distribution centers had its own data center, ran their own AS/400, and ran their own copy of the software.

“Shortly thereafter, we started the Regional Operating Centers project that consolidated all of the processing into two regional centers in St. Augustine and Dallas. Now, we have consolidated all the processing onto a partitioned System i Model 570 in St. Augustine, where we run all of the warehousing, distribution, and financial applications for 12 distribution centers. The System i also hosts a production partition for our Canadian operations as well as a data warehouse partition and a development partition.

“Our core system is a warehousing and distribution system called NTS, the National Tree System that was written in-house. We have several other applications such as JD Edwards World for financials and E3 for purchasing.”

Getting started with operations automation
When the divisions were decentralized, some facilities were using the Robot products and some were not. Among the divisions that were using the products, there were various degrees of success. As Tree of Life began to consolidate the processing to one centralized system at their headquarters, the company soon realized that Robot/SCHEDULE, Robot/ALERT, and Robot/NETWORK would help make the company a true 24/7 operation.

John works with Jennifer Weatherly, Operation Analyst. Jennifer spoke about centralizing Robot/SCHEDULE jobs, “We had several different jobs set up on different partitions. We wanted to convert all jobs from all partitions to a master system [on the Robot/NETWORK Host], where we put the jobs in one location and then send them out to the appropriate partition. [Help/Systems] Tech Support was instrumental in teaching us how to send the existing jobs—including OPAL code, library lists, job environments, date objects, reserved command variables, and so on—up from the Nodes (partitions) to the Host to create the master. Now we set up new Robot/SCHEDULE jobs, and changes to existing jobs in the master, and then send the job or jobs back to the Nodes. This setup helps us work efficiently with jobs that we maintain on a regular basis. At one time, if we had a job that existed on more than one partition, we had to change the job on each partition. Now, we change the job once and send it down to the node or nodes. With 12 divisions running 8,000 jobs on a daily basis, this is a big help.”

The next step: automating report management
Tree of Life also implemented Robot/REPORTS to manage their reports. Jennifer explains, “Tree of Life had Robot/REPORTS, but the company was not utilizing the product when I started six years ago. I began by reading the manual and trying to set up reports. Whenever I ran into a roadblock, I’d just pick up the phone and call Help/Systems Technical Support. I was pleasantly surprised to find someone always available. I didn’t waste valuable time on hold. Even after normal support hours, you usually get a call back in a half hour or less.

“Because of the 12 divisions, we have a lot of reports. We are trying to eliminate printing so many reports. We have about 80% of our reports available for online viewing and we use Robot/ALERT to e-mail reports to users, customers, field sales support, and others.”

John adds, “We have had a tremendous reduction in printed reports since we started using Robot/REPORTS. Not only are we saving paper, but people have a lot better access to the reports now—especially people who are out in the field. We had no way of getting printed reports to a lot of our salespeople. Now they can view the reports online. That’s a big benefit for us.”

Jennifer explains another project they are completing, “We have to get monthly reports out to our customers. In the past, a group of employees would come in on a weekend, print cover statements, and break down a 700-page report by customer for mailing. Now we use Robot/SCHEDULE, Robot/ALERT, and Robot/REPORTS to accomplish the same task. We’re saving on printing, postage, and overtime.”

Jennifer and John prove that the Robot products help them live well in the data center, just as Tree of Life products help people live well at home.

By Barbara Davey

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 8:51 am and is filed under Robot/ALERT, Robot/NETWORK, Robot/REPORTS, Robot/SCHEDULE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.