Johannesburg, 18 May 2010
To cater for its growing workload, FALKE South Africa, a leading local supplier of quality socks, hosiery and sports underwear, has upgraded its IT infrastructure with the help of EOH Managed Services Western Cape.
The company's largest production facility is based in Cape Town and is dependent on an integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to keep production running efficiently.
EOH implemented FALKE's SYSPRO ERP business software in 2004, and has been supplying the manufacturer with infrastructure services ever since, including SYSPRO consulting and support, infrastructure consulting, hardware and software, and a technical managed services contract to maintain it all.
The SYSPRO solution was originally installed on a single server running Microsoft's Small Business Server system software. As FALKE has expanded and both processing volumes and the number of system users increased, the operational and functional limits of the Small Business Server environment were reached. At the same time, the upgradeability of the hardware server environment was also reaching its limit.
To cater for the anticipated workload for the next three to five years, a decision was taken to upgrade both the system software and the server hardware environments. It was decided to replace the Small Business Server software with Microsoft's Enterprise Class server operating systems, and the hardware was replaced with robust industry-leading Dell enterprise-server platforms.
“We were pleased with the planning and the resources EOH was able to apply to the infrastructure upgrade. The server replacement went smoothly, taking no more than a weekend to effect, while the system software upgrade took no more than a day,” says Peter Arnold, FALKE's IT manager.
FALKE is now in a position to consider the expansion of several of the SYSPRO system's areas, including implementing additional functionality within its existing environments, such as production, distribution and management information, and then also implementing these facilities at the other business sites within FALKE South Africa.
“This project gave us the opportunity to refresh the documentation and processes involved in the provision of our service to FALKE. It's not often that you get such an opportunity to take a step back and re-evaluate all the hardware and software employed in an ERP system at an existing client,” points out Clive Koen, EOH's service delivery manager.
“EOH is an important feature in our lives, we rely on them to keep our IT systems up and running,” notes Arnold, referring to the fact that EOH has staff based full-time at FALKE to maintain its infrastructure services as part of the managed services contract.
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