Carolina Turkeys

Ron Wells

MIS Director

Carolina Turkeys

Carolina Turkeys is coming up on the 20-year anniversary. And when the company was first started they purchased a software package from a local programmer. And it performed well, it did the job through the years, we had programmers onsite.

It was customized, changed, but it got to a point that there were so many foundational challenges with the things that we would have to spend a lot of time to go back and revisit that the decision was made that it was time to get a new package.

The first decision was made that yes, we're going to go with SAP. Then we started out to decide, well, what platform is it going to run on? In a small shop like we have here, I'm a big fan of equipment that just runs. Doesn't require a lot of hand holding, it doesn't require patches on a daily basis. It makes a lot of sense to go the i Series route.

So we set out to find some customers that IBM had that were running SAP, happened to be current versions on an iSeries. And working with our IBM Business Partner and some other people at IBM, we were put in touch with companies that had done just that.

And I was very impressed with the performance. We actually even made an onsite visit to see SAP running on an iSeries. So when we made our decision we were confident that we would be successful with it.

We priced the UNIX base system and usually the stereotype for iSeries was, well, it runs good but it's expensive. We found that the first part is true. It runs very well. But it was a very cost effective platform for us to run on.

Connie M. Jones

Computer Operations Manager

Carolina Turkeys

The iSeries makes like easier because you just don't have to sit there and manhandle it, or woman handle it all day long. You know, it just runs and you know, it's easy to set equipment up, it's easy to set new users up and it's a reliable machine so you can take on other tasks, multitask and not just have to...it just does its job just like it supposed to.

WELLS: The users here at Carolina Turkeys know that we're running SAP on an iSeries. An important point is that it's really invisible to them: no matter what platform you run on, SAP presents itself in the same manner.

JONES: The main difference that they're seeing is the GUI interface. People are more comfortable with the GUI now because they're so used to having computers and the Internet at home.

WELLS: There is a certain confidence that the users have: well, you know, we didn't experience downtime with the iSeries before so this ought to work really well. We're not adding something new that's going to bring another layer of complexity.

Ed Kacsuta

Chief Financial Officer

Carolina Turkeys

You need to seriously consider IBM, you need to seriously consider the iSeries for SAP mid market implementation. And don't let anybody talk you out of at least talking to IBM.