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Fuji Xerox
Fuji Xerox replaces old Unix box with powerful Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER
When Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd. of Japan introduced its Xerox business machines to the Philippines in 1965, the country was the first in Asia to ever market plain paper copiers. The growth of Fuji Xerox Philippines (FXP), the exclusive distributor of Xerox business machines in the country, since then has become astronomical, having the largest sales and market coverage and the largest service network in the industry.
The company has been in the Top 1000 corporations for many years, ranking 565, while it stands at the 71st position in the ICT industry.
FXP distributes Xerox-branded digital business machines such as color copiers, color printers, multi-function machines (copying machine, facsimile, and printer), publishing systems, computers, workstations, networks and servers, document management solutions and services, document management software, engineering systems, color plotters, plain paper plotters, large-format copying machines, image processing systems, document projectors, copying machine-related equipment, and consumables (paper and toner).
Its operations are geographically divided into four regions - Metro Sales Operations, Northern Luzon Operations, Southern Luzon Operations, and Visayas and Mindanao Operations.
Other groups were created to specifically handle global, Japanese, and national accounts, production and systems marketing and channel business operations. As a whole, the company is operating with 25 branches and depots with full service capabilities to complement its network. Each of these offices is equipped with necessary resources to operate independently as a branch.
"In the continuous quest for quality and customer satisfaction as top priority, FXP sought the help of technology to improve its internal operations and meet the ever-growing and demanding service requirements of its end-users.
Powerful server
One important aspect in its technology infrastructure is the choice of a powerful server that would house the various mission-critical applications of FXP. Since 1997, the company had been using a server that did not meet its requirements. And when an upgrade was identified, the implementation proved to be very expensive and in the end, became impractical.
FXP looked into the four-SPARC64 processor Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER 400/700MHz rack-mounted server as a strong replacement for the company's old Unix server to run its Oracle financials, general ledger, accounts payable and receivable, fixed assets, data warehouse, HR management, inventory, and business intelligence applications.
FXP's nationwide network include 300 PC's in nine branches all over the Philippines, including the head office, all connected via frame relay and leased line connections.
The rewarding experience came in fast with application response and efficiency of transactions twice faster than the old server at bigger capacity, said Joey Alba, IT manager of FXP. "The accuracy and productivity of our users became higher too. When it comes to availability of the system, we have never encountered any downtime unlike in our old server when it constantly experienced overloading so we usually had down time three times in a week."
Standard system
By first week of June 2003, FXP will be upgrading its Oracle Financials to Oracle ITSS (Information Technology Shared Service) using the Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER server. The ITSS consists of inventory, logistics, HR management, financial, and data warehouse applications, including business intelligence.
The BIS is crucial because the company can get information for sales groups such as customer information, digital copying and printing machine information, and competitors' movements. HR management will be online by October 2003.
"ITSS will solve the issues we are facing now. We had difficulty generating standard reports and forms from different sources, particularly from our Unix-based legacy applications. We sought to solve that problem with this new system," said Alba.
Managing people
"We are learning a lot from this project such as managing people, time, and budget. We need to stand on these challenges and answer some important questions like "do we need more people to come up with the better implementation, are the tasks achieved today enough to reach our goals for the project, and what trainings should be done to better equip our staff," added Alba.
(From left to right) Neil Duran, IT Supervisor, and Joey Alba, IT Manager of FXP
Managing time is such a challenge, he pointed out. And teamwork, as well as building and enhancing relationships with FXP end-users, is key to make the various ICT projects work successfully. "You need to be sociable also. IT people are no longer confined in the IT room, so we need to go out and talk to end-users. That's what we are doing to get what we need and get what they need as well. If we can do it, then do it. We should not be waiting for things to happen," he said.
Quality service
Alba reiterated that engineers from Fujitsu Philippines have served FXP well. The service is done systematically, while the response time promised is reached.
"There was a technical problem that happened on a Sunday, the motherboard of the server had to be replaced so when I called, I was really shocked because I expected that no one would answer the FPI hotline. The engineer immediately responded and was even willing to go on a Sunday to give a replacement motherboard."
Aside from quality after-sales service, FXP considered the Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER because of the recommendation from its Singapore regional office, which is also using the Fujitsu server. Speed and reliability were key factors the FXP IT team considered and found available in the Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER server.
