Home Farm Foods Opts for Managed Services From IBM

Home Farm Foods Opts for Managed Services From IBM

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced an agreement with Home Farm Foods, one of the UK’s leading providers of home-delivered meals for the elderly. The agreement is helping Home Farm Foods improve customer service, protect valuable transactional data and provide a reliable infrastructure for a growing business.

Working with IBM and Triangle, an IBM Business Partner, Home Farm Foods implemented a cost-effective, reliable, managed data protection solution that reduced the delivery time of critical business planning and forecasting reports from more than five minutes to a few seconds. The company also increased productivity by freeing up staff time, allowing them to focus on core activities rather than system availability tasks.

Tony Blood, Marketing Director at Home Farm Foods explains: “Our old system was creaking and, without a dedicated in-house IT resource, it fell to me to keep it up and running. This took a significant amount of my time and diverted me away from my core responsibilities. Now, we can relax in the knowledge that our data is safely stored without any effort on our part. In addition to the reliability and performance of our new server, we are seeing great productivity improvements. Our previously recurrent IT problems have disappeared, giving us more time to focus on improving our service to distributors and customers.”

Home Farm Foods’ 27 regionally based franchised distributors operate from their own local systems, logging onto the central server once a week to download transactional data or place stock orders. In the past, the volume of data being handled meant the head office system slowed right down. This made the extraction of crucial reports, forecasts and planning information a slow and frustrating process.

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