Possibilities - Honey Baked Hams - Information Flow is Food for Thought

Contact:   eSoft, Inc. (Makers of TBBS)
           15200 E. Girard Ave., Suite 3000
           Aurora, CO  80014
           (303) 699-6565      Voice
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HONEY BAKED HAMS - INFORMATION FLOW IS FOOD FOR THOUGHT
-------------------------------------------------------

*** From October 1990 Possibilities Newsletter ***
*** Copyright 1990 by eSoft, Inc.  All Rights Reserved ***

Honey Baked Hams -- Information Flow is Food for Thought
by Alan Bechtold

If you have ever visited a Honey Baked Ham store you know that they provide 
a unique spiral-sliced honey glazed ham.  You are probably remembering that 
fresh cooked aroma even now ...  What you have probably never considered is 
what it takes behind the scenes to provide fresh cooked food every day in 
retail outlets nationwide.

Honey Baked Hams Corporation of Atlanta has 60 retail outlets nationwide 
which sell nearly 100 other items in addition to the specialty hams for 
which they are named.  Each store must be kept properly supplied with fresh 
products -- but not over supplied or waste and stale food will result. To 
accomplish this Honey Baked Hams' retail outlets must deliver sales, 
inventory and payroll information to the Atlanta main office daily.

This information is compiled into daily and weekly reports that are 
important to the company's day-to-day operation and to its plans for the 
future.  Weekly inventory projections are prepared by the company's central 
offices, based on the daily sales and inventory information submitted by 
each outlet.  Inventory projections are then compared with the projections 
made by each individual store.

This data is compiled and processed in Atlanta on a minicomputer running the 
PICK operating system.  This system generates the information to keep the 
nation-wide operation coordinated and flowing smoothly.

The minicomputer was installed six or seven years ago, and initially 
accepted calls directly from each store.  Data was dumped to the mini as 
straight ASCII text files without flow control or error checking, because 
this was all that the minicomputer could support.  It took each store 10-15 
minutes to transfer its files in this manner.  Occasional (and inevitable) 
telephone line noise resulted in numerous errors in the received files, and 
it took much too long to transfer all of the data.

According to Honey Baked Hams TBBS System Designer Walter James, checking 
each file for those inescapable errors wasn't easy.  "We had to add up all 
the data then see if the totals matched the totals each store had.  It 
wasn't very effective."

James did find a telecommunications package for their mini that worked well 
at speeds of up to 9600 baud -- but incoming data could only come from hard-
wired terminals.  He still needed an effective and reliable way to collect 
the data from all of the Honey Baked Hams stores.

Thanks to a tip from system designer Rodney Aloia, James discovered TBBS 
multi-line information manager software.  He installed TBBS on an 80286 PC 
with six incoming lines.  He also hardwired the PC to the headquarters 
minicomputer via another serial port.  Now TBBS acts as a data collection 
system handling up to six stores at once calling those lines with their PCs 
to submit the data files.  Error free binary transfer protocols guarantee 
faster data transfer and data integrity.  The collected files are then 
transferred to the minicomputer, where they are compiled and processed.

Commercial communications packages were sent to each retail outlet.  "We 
also installed special QuickBasic programs on each stores' computer, to 
fully automate the process of dialing in to the headquarters system, logging 
on and sending all necessary files.  This way, everything is menu driven.  
It allows store employees to simply point at an on-screen menu option and 
shoot to start the transfer."

James set up a simple TBBS system, since it was designed only for file 
transfers by their various retail outlet stores.  There are no message bases 
so he set up one menu that would automatically jump each store to its own 
private upload directory based on the userlog authorization flags.

Setting up a special upload area for each store also solved the one 
structural problem James encountered along the way.  "Each store's files are 
named the same," James said.  "It was much easier to automatically jump each 
store to its own menu than it would have been to write separate macro files 
and programs for each store's communications package, renaming their files 
before they were sent.  Thus, all 60 daily and weekly uploaded files are 
directed to different subdirectories on the PC and TBBS never sees duplicate 
files."

A TBBS external event automatically drops the company's online information 
system to DOS every night and concatenates all the individual files from 
each subdirectory into a single file.  It then sends the final file, by way 
of the hardwired connection, to the minicomputer for final processing.

"I also really like the way TBBS will come up online automatically after a 
re-boot.  There are a lot of thunderstorms and power interruptions in our 
area.  If there is a power outage, TBBS just starts right back up as soon as 
power is restored.  External events that weren't completed during the outage 
pick right up where they left off, too.  That was amazing.

"The software's remote system operator capabilities were also impressive.  
When I'm at home evenings or on the weekend it takes me just a few minutes 
to log onto the system remotely, bring TBBS down, and look through my log 
files to see if all the files have come in from the various retail stores.  
Then I can check to see if they've been properly processed and sent to the 
mini.  All from an easy chair at home."

The Honey Baked Hams TBBS doesn't have TIMS or TDBS or even SYSOM, although 
James says the company has some people looking into other possible uses for 
the system now that it's online.  However the Honey Baked Hams installation 
shows the value of using TBBS for a single data collection task.

In many business situations a single data transportation problem is the most 
difficult problem to solve.  Often it can absorb tremendous amounts of time 
and money and still be the weak link in an otherwise good system.  TBBS 
offers an off the shelf, low complexity solution to many of these problems.  
After all, it doesn't take too many weeks of sending files by overnight 
courier to pay for a complete TBBS hardware and software installation.  And 
far too many businesses are still connecting widely separated computers by 
express mail because they don't know another way.

- END -
PS1090-3
Rev. 10/90

Copyright (C) 1994 eSoft, Inc., All Rights Reserved.  Permission granted
to distribute this file in its entirety, without modification, to any
interested party.  Any other use requires the written permission of
eSoft, Inc.

IMPORTANT:  The information herein is subject to change without notice.
Please call or write to confirm factual information of importance to you
or your organization.

