One of New Zealand’s biggest brewers, Auckland-based DB Breweries Limited manufactures such major brands as Heineken, Monteiths, Export Gold, DB Draught and Tui.  Dutch brewing giant Heineken is one of the company’s major shareholders. The New Zealand Stock Exchange-listed company (NZX: DBB) recorded revenues of NZ$317.8 million in 2003.  DB Breweries employs 530 people spread across 12 offices and four breweries.

The Challenge: Lower Administration Costs and Improve Remote Office Connectivity

With a large installed base of ageing PCs, IT stability was proving to be a problem for DB Breweries. Instead of focusing on the business’s requirements, the brewer’s IT management was continually distracted by the limitations of its infrastructure. The crunch came when DB Breweries wanted to deploy some of the latest productivity applications while avoiding the expense of replacing its existing hardware.

At the same time, the brewer was keen to reduce its support costs.  With four breweries and 12 sales offices scattered from Invercargill, on the South Island, to Whangarei, on the North Island, the unreliability of many of the older PCs meant that routine maintenance was consuming an overly large slice of DB Breweries’ IT resources.

“We were spending far too much time fighting fires,” said Andrew Cammell, Information Systems Manager at DB Breweries. “As a result, IT was holding up the rest of the business. Rolling out an application or software patch to 500 people would take months because of all the time spent solving problems day to day.”

DB Breweries also wanted to improve its support for the remote offices and its disaster recovery capabilities.  Applications in the remote offices were run from the local machines, which began to suffer from a lack of disk space.  With the data saved locally as well, DB ran the risk of losing data should a hard drive fail.  There were also a number of databases running locally at each site that were consolidated and backed up monthly. This approach was proving problematic, as the consolidation was very time consuming for a number of people who should have been focused on other activities around month-end.

Implementing a Citrix Solution for Remote Office Connectivity

DB Breweries worked with Axon Computer Systems Limited, a Gold Citrix® Solution Advisor, to find a solution to its IT challenges.  The company decided to implement a new access infrastructure based on Citrix MetaFrame® Presentation Server with Microsoft® Windows® 2000 servers.

The Citrix solution enabled DB Breweries to roll out newer versions of applications without replacing its entire hardware platform.  Now, 250 concurrent users in 16 locations are able to access line-of-business and office productivity applications quickly and reliably, using a mixture of legacy PCs, notebooks and thin-client terminals. Applications deployed include proprietary applications such as BCS (Brewery Control System), SAP, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook, Cognos reporting tools, Lotus Notes and GEM, a package developed with Stay-in-Front Technology.

Reduced Costs and Ability to Focus on Core Business

Phase I of DB Breweries’ implementation of Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server focused on extending the life of existing hardware, reducing administration costs and reducing the data security problems.  Phase II focused on improving remote user access and providing access to information from anywhere, at any time and over any device.  DB Breweries believes that implementing a centralised application access infrastructure will save in hardware and support costs, as well as provide a better disaster recovery solution.

The Citrix solution greatly increased the efficiency of IT staff.  Whereas the company previously had a full-time employee to support just a few regional and sales offices, that position has now been expanded to support 250 users with no additional resources required.  The solution has also facilitated system upgrade and maintenance. “We get regular patches for BCS from Heineken, which can be a relatively major upgrade. Patching 50 to 60 machines around the country was very time-consuming, but now that we’ve centralised applications onto Citrix servers, we can do it overnight in a couple of hours,” Cammell explained.

“The end result of these efficiencies is that DB Breweries’ IT department is no longer fighting fires, and IT problems are no longer distracting the company from its core business,” said Cammell.  

In addition to the reduced administration load, the Citrix solution has also improved DB Breweries’ data security and disaster recovery capabilities. “All our sites now access the databases and other applications directly through MetaFrame Presentation Server, and the data is stored in Auckland on servers that are backed up regularly. Also, we’ve set up a disaster recovery site in Christchurch as part of the Citrix server farm, so that if we should we have a problem, those servers would be able to support key users,” said Cammell.

Because MetaFrame Presentation Server only transmits mouse clicks and screen updates over the network, DB Breweries’ deployment of a Citrix solution has also provided major productivity benefits for remote users. “The PCs and network links were both slow, so deploying MetaFrame Presentation Server has increased our remote users’ productivity by allowing them to access applications more quickly,” Cammell said.

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