Home Farm Foods, a UK supplier of home-delivered meals for the elderly, has signed a managed services contract with IBM to improve customer service, protect data and increase productivity.

IBM and Triangle, an IBM business partner, have introduced an IBM system x Express Server to speed up performance and undertake automatic online backups to a secure offsite data centre, replacing tape-based backup procedures.

As the company grew, it found its in-house IT systems were creaking under growing data volumes and there were concerns over data security.

The company’s 27 regional franchise distributors use their own systems, logging on to the central server once a week to download transactional data or place stock orders.

When Home Farm Foods managed its IT services in-house, the volume of data slowed down its head office system and created bottlenecks in extracting crucial reports, forecasts and planning information.

Now reports can be generated in a few seconds rather than taking over five minutes, and staff can focus on core activities.

Tony Blood, marketing director at Home Farm Foods, said: ‘Without a dedicated in-house IT resource, it fell to me to keep the system 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,’ he added.

The company is now working towards having one centrally managed IT infrastructure shared by head office and distributors, accessed through a standard user interface.

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