Hospitality group
Fuller Smith & Turner
is upgrading its technology systems to better address the business
challenges faced by the UK brewing industry.
Fuller's sells a growing variety of wines, owns and manages
about 160 pubs and has more than 200 pubs with tenants. It also has
two large hotels and four smaller inns. The company has just
reported record profits of £29m on sales of £178m.
Mid-sized brewers such as Fuller's face challenges that include
changing customer tastes and habits, competition from well-funded
overseas competitors, a declining market and government
regulations.
At a technology level, Fuller's wants to reduce complexity,
improve administration and responsiveness to changes in the market,
as well as control costs. To this end the company is implementing
virtualisation technology to imitate a mainframe
environment.
"We like the
mainframe approach; we like centralisation," said Colin
Simpson, group systems manager at Fuller's.
To align the IT infrastructure to address business challenges,
Simpson's first step is to slim Fuller's complement of more than 40
Microsoft NT servers to about eight running
VMware virtualisation
software.
The mainframe-like set-up will increase server capacity
utilisation from about 4% in one case to closer to 60%, he said.
"This will reduce running costs and the administrative
overhead."
At the same time, he will set up a
storage area network (San) to look after the company's
1.5Tbytes of data and allow for future data expansion. Pubs
presently have thin-client access to Microsoft Office and other
applications under Fuller's
Citrix environment.
"It is a pain to back-up 40 servers, and it was eating into our
operational time," Simpson said.
The second step is to replace a 20-year-old Siemens iSDX voice
system with a
voice over IP system from Alcatel. Simpson said, "We sweated
that asset. The reliability was OK, but we were finding it
difficult to find replacement parts when things went wrong. And we
were running out of capacity."
Fuller's selected Alcatel after a thorough
review of the market. It ripped out the old system and put in the
new one - including uninterruptible power supplies to power the
voice servers - over a single weekend. "Everything went fine. We
spent the second day testing and fine-tuning. Now we are expecting
real cost savings from VoIP," Simpson said.
In the future Fuller's plans to provide the company's 160
managed pubs with broadband data and telephony links for online
transactions.
Fuller's will supplement this with a network of pub-based Wi-Fi
hotspots controlled from its Chiswick headquarters. The company's
larger hotels currently provide Wi-Fi services to customers via a
system from OnSite Telecoms, but the smaller inns have an
outsourced service from The Cloud.
The brewer hopes the Wi-Fi service will attract new, young
drinkers to the pubs. It will also let the pubs convert to mobile
tills. "This is in keeping with our intention to continue to focus
more on food, in part a response to the coming smoking ban,"
Simpson said.
Customers will no longer have to hand over their credit cards
when they pay their bills, which should help allay fears about ID
theft.
This customer focus extends to Simpson's plans to enhance
Fuller's existing Strategix enterprise resource planning system,
which runs on an RS/6000 server under AIX, IBM's Unix
implementation.
The enhancement will add a "dashboard" layer that integrates
live customer and business data to provide role and
transaction-dependent insights into the underlying data. These
include accounts, distribution, sales and purchasing
transactions.
"The aim is to provide users with an accurate real-time picture
of what is happening in the business, and to alert them when an
exception occurs," Simpson said.
Simpson also plans to set up a product catalogue on an as-yet
unnamed trading exchange. This will establish an e-commerce system
for online orders, invoicing and settlement for its managed
pubs.
The aim is to consolidate purchases as much as possible to take
advantage of volume discounts available from suppliers. "We used to
have about 3,000 suppliers, but we halved that," Simpson said. "If
we can improve our margins on food by 1%, the system will pay for
itself in months."
Information from this system will be integrated with the
ERP system and dashboard so that the brewer can pay invoices
online. "Pubs will place orders via the exchange and check their
invoices against delivery. Once they are happy, we will pay. In
practice it amounts to the pubs self-invoicing," Simpson said.
The system will simplify administration of Fuller's purchasing,
but it is also flexible enough to allow pub chefs to add favourite
local suppliers. This will help Fuller's satisfy two aspects of
good corporate citizenship, to support local producers and open up
new markets for them, and to reduce "food miles" and the associated
carbon footprint.
While these projects take care of the brewer's business systems,
Simpson is keen to see if there is value in linking the business
side to the industrial control systems that run the brewery's
operations.
"Other brewers are doing it, and we want to see if we are
missing something," Simpson said.
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