Peerless

Peerless Foods Eyes Substantial Savings with Actian Ingres Database

Highlights

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.

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.

“We needed a number of features specific to our industry, and the off-the-shelf products just didn’t have what we needed,” said Adrian Hamilton, Chief Information Officer, Peerless Foods. “Developing the system would deliver quite a large savings on license fees, but would also be more operationally favorable by providing the flexibility to do what we want.”

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.

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

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.

The Ingres-based application environment has met expectations so well that Peerless has also repurposed the platform for a number of other applications, on selling it through its PeerCore business arm as a bespoke commercial solution that leverages the same development innovation that has made it so successful.

“It 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,” said Hamilton. “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.”

Results

In less than one year, the following had to be delivered:

• Underlying Ingres database provides a common data platform across the business and saves Peerless Foods between $300,000 to $400,000 a year in licensing fees.
• Enterprise resource planning (ERP) application manages and automates every aspect of Peerless Foods’ planning, production and distribution.
• Ingres OpenROAD development environment empowers developers to deliver business functionality quickly and efficiently.
• Ingres BI Appliance delivered production, forecasting, planning and sales analysis.
• Software development success has enabled Peerless to resell its ERP and underlying open-source database platform on a commercial basis through its PeerCore business arm.