CALIFORNIA COMPUTES: PART 1

From PickWorld Magazine Article, January/February 1995 issue

Making Shrimp Happen

Meridian Products Inc. is a company that knows how to plan its work and work its plan. The $240-million Santa Fe Springs-based seafood distributor is also agile enough to quickly respond to unexpected opportunities.

Meridian was well on its way to implementing an IT plan designed to support a doubling of sales when along came the blockbuster movie " Forrest Gump. " The hit the biggest ever for Paramount Pictures and fourth-largest grossing film in North America at last report presented MPI with a potential marketing bonanza that underlined the wisdom of planning for growth.

Anthony Zolezzi, after a decade in marketing at Ralston Purina, joined Meridian in January 1994. In August, he saw the movie that triggered the licensing idea. After five weeks of negotiation with Los Angeles-based Viacom Consumer Products, the deal was done. Last October, Bubba Gump products started appearing in supermarkets. The licensing deal was a major coup for Meridian`s vice president of new business development, and a chance to move solidly into the higher profit arena of branded seafood.

Already a major player in the seafood industry, MPI has enjoyed steady growth since its 1976 founding. CEO Richard Martin is a past president of the National Fisheries Institute, while vice president of sales and marketing Ernest Wayland is president of the California Fisheries and Seafood Institute.

The privately held company sources shrimp, crab, lobster and fish (more than 100 species in all) from 300 suppliers in 40 countries. Its customers, primarily in North America, total more than 1,100.

To prepare for accelerating growth, management at Meridian brought Robert " Bud " James on- board in 1993 with a mandate to conceive and implement a new information technology architecture. Thanks to James` ability to clearly lay out the options and to the enlightened attitude of MPI`s management toward IT, Meridian now stands as a showcase operation.

A carefully planned and managed migration plan has allowed the benefits of new technology to be phased in without disrupting the growing business. One of the first upgrades was the move to a Hewlett-Packard 9000 Series 800 system with a single 96MHz RISC processor. Also chosen for ease of migration and performance considerations was Advanced Pick 6.1 from Pick Systems. " We wanted to move seamlessly from our existing system, " commented James. " There was no time in our plan for conversion modifications like changing spooler procedures and program conversion. "

Starting with a Microdata Reality system, Meridian had been a Pick user for more than 12 years. Over time, the company upgraded to an Ultimate system and, later, an IBM RT running Open Architecture. Working with dealer Micro Systems Integration, James knew that the choice of Advanced Pick gave the assurance he could simply recompile the existing programs and have his applications up and running immediately.

Up and racing might be a more accurate description. James used a little psychology to put the users in a good frame of mind about the change. In addition to the faster processing of the HP system, users enjoyed a doubling of screen refresh performance with 19.2kbps terminal connections.

" The speed is astronomical, " James reports. " We`re completely blown away. And when we need more power, we can upgrade to symmetrical multiprocessing with a simple change of the cpu board. " An example of the performance gains netted from the Hewlett-Packard and Advanced Pick 6.1 is one process that went from two hours, 13 minutes on the RT to 17 minutes.

Admittedly, some of the other changes required more effort than changing boxes. With hundreds of products and prices changing two or three times a day, Meridian had been struggling with a semiautomated system to make up-to-date pricing information available to sales representatives. To accommodate the need to show pricing based on product and territory, James envisioned a three-dimensional interface similar to linked spreadsheets.

Though no product he found precisely fulfilled his vision, James collaborated with Jim Paul of Northtec Consulting Group, Pittsburgh, Penn., to craft a solution. Paul adapted the object- oriented technology behind his DigiTouch Pick-based spreadsheet to the Meridian project. The result gave James what his users needed three-dimensional spreadsheets, based on the current pricing database, with " drill-down " capability to punch through to the needed details.

In addition to its California headquarters, Meridian has offices in Bloomfield, N.J., Brownsville, Texas, and Seattle, so E-mail is another important application. In solving that need, MPI had the distinction of serving as the first Advanced Pick HP installation of the Desqtop office automation system from Monolith Corp.

Though no " data cop, " James felt a need to " serve and protect " MPI`s information processing needs. So in addition to developing a system to support growth, he built an infrastructure to protect from disasters.

" We all live with disasters every day, " said James. " When the Big One hits, there won`t be anyone here. I know my family will be my first priority. " To deal with these realities, Meridian is constructing a highly redundant data management system with remote network management and automatic switchover in the event of a primary system failure.

Meridian based its strategy for resilient computing on the knowledge that a single day with no computer would have an insignificant impact on business and 48-hours sans system would be a hardship. But within 72 hours the company would start to lose business. So, the 100-user main system was configured more to protect data than to totally eliminate system downtime. Mirrored 3GB disk subsystems Advanced Pick`s Halt Tolerance feature and redundant power supplies protect against data loss. James opted for a smaller hot back-up system, soon to be installed in the New Jersey office. This will provide processing power in the event of the loss of the Santa Fe Springs headquarters building. Every write to the primary system will be mirrored to the remote disk over the network using tape sockets.

At present the four locations are linked by dedicated 56KB circuits with switched 56KB lines for backup. Meridian will soon upgrade the network to Frame Relay for improved economy and the flexibility to quickly adjust bandwidth to match demand.

The HP solution satisfied two key disaster recovery considerations. By placing a second system in a branch office, James achieved higher confidence than possible in a single fault-tolerant machine. And Hewlett-Packard supports the entire WAN architecture that gives Meridian its expected reliability; thus eliminating any potential finger-pointing in the middle of a crisis.

A key reason HP can offer the total system and network support James sought is its OpenView network node manager. In a recent article, Unix Review called it " a superb network-management package. " With OpenView, the network can be reconfigured locally, from a remote PC or from HP`s national response center where technicians can diagnose and resolve problems anywhere in the net. It is programmed to automatically switch all users to the New Jersey system in the event the main unit becomes inoperative.

When the new project (including 30 man-months of re-engineering applications) is complete in the first quarter of 1995, Meridian Products will be ready to buck the Big One. They`ll also be equipped to ship shrimp. And that`s no small matter. After all, as they say at Meridian, " shrimp happens! "