Background

Founded in 1965, Family Center Farm & Home stores remain family-owned and operated. The company operates 7 retail stores with 136 employees offering farm, agriculture, and power equipment, as well as hardware, lawn and garden, wild bird, heating, and pet supplies. Family Center Farm & Home operates in the States of Missouri and Kansas.

General Manager/COO Starts With No Computer Training

Bill Manion serves as General Manager and Chief Operating Officer. He has been with Family Center for 36 years. He is also responsible for Family Center’s IT.

Bill laughs, “I had no computer training before I started here. Somebody had to do it. I would not consider myself a computer expert by any means, but I know more about computers now than I ever wanted to.”

Covid-19 Creates Additional Sales

Bill reflects, “We were actually fortunate as a result of Covid-19. Our customers want stuff for home, like power tools and animal and pet food. They could easily come in to our store to get what they needed at the same prices instead of driving 30 minutes to a big discount store. They can even come into our stores with their pets.”

Retail Locations With MPLS, Fluctuating 40 GBPS Bandwidth, Cellular Backup

“To support our retail operation, we have 7 retail locations with MPLS to our main office. Our bandwidth is 40 GBPS up and down. We also have cellular internet backup.”

IBM 8202-E4B At V7.3 And 70% Utilization – Time For A Change

“We had an IBM 8202-E4B at V7.3 supporting 30 users with Horizon Retail, our business software. We were at 70% disk utilization. I think we were getting to end of life on the machine so we thought it was time to make a change.”

IBM iSeries Experience Hard To Find These Days

“You know, it’s harder and harder to find anybody experienced with IBM iSeries, so all that kind of played into us thinking about switching to cloud hosting. We decided to do something different.

“Our software provider, Horizon Retail, had looked into a few hosting providers and recommended Cloud400. So, I pretty much went with their suggestion. I thought if they have researched it and done the work, I am going to take them at their suggestion. That way if it does not work out I got someone to yell at, right?”

Cloud400 Offers Free Trial

“So, we picked Cloud400 to start cloud testing. Besides, Cloud400 offers a free trial. We completed and returned the Cloud400 readiness document to plan for our free testing phase. We determined we had plenty of bandwidth to support our operation and retail stores.”

Cloud400 Made Whole Process Easy

Bill continues, “Cloud400 made the whole process from initial setup to go live easy for us. We sent them an LTO tape of our system. They had us connected and loaded in no time. We started testing our system right away.”

Cloud400 Technical Team Very Accessible, Friendly, Knowledgeable

“The Cloud400 technical team was really good. Very accessible, friendly and knowledgeable. They booted me up a system to test on.

“In about a week we tested the 90% that was most important to us.”

Upgraded To V7.4, Tested EDI – Everything Tested Out Well Again

“Everything tested out well. Then I had the Cloud400 engineers upgrade us to V7.4. We tested about a week. We also tested our EDI. Everything tested out well again. Did not have any issues.”

Weekend Go Live Takes A Day

Bill goes on, “After testing we picked a weekend 3 weeks later to go live. I spent about 8 hours making another full back up tape on Friday to FedEx overnight to Cloud400. They had it the next Saturday morning before noon.

“Cloud400 loaded it and we were off and running. We were up by 7:00 PM that evening. Horizon Retail entered their software keys in about 20 minutes for the hosting server serial number.

“The process was seamless. The Cloud400 speed is great. Our work zips right through.”

Client Access/iAccess Users – Moved All To Client Access – Except 3

“We had a mixed use of Client Access and iAccess. We moved all Client Access users over to iAccess. We have had some minor issues with iAccess for 3 of our users. Cloud400 has been very helpful.

“We believe the connectivity issues are at our end. We are working through them. It’s got to be something unique with those particular workstations. We’ll figure it out, though.”

Huge IFS File Not Completely Saved In Save21

“Also, I was in such a hurry to get the last Save21 out that one big IFS file did not save completely. It’s an enormous file. In talking to my software provider afterwards they mentioned that particular file does not do well in a Save21 type situation. This file consisted of receipts from the past, who knows, 5 to 7 years? So that did not come across like it should have. I still have the machine here so when I get time I will get it fixed.

“Other than that, there were no issues with migrating to Cloud400. We were up and running. Everything works fine.”

Bill Manion Recommends Cloud400

When asked if he would recommend Cloud400, Bill responds. “I would recommend Cloud400. The process is seamless. The requirements for the client side are minimal other than testing. So, it was a very easy process.

“Once setup, the client tests to makes sure everything is OK. The go live went smoothly. I am happy with the results. My users don’t know where the server is … nor do they really care.

“Now our system is managed by IBM i experts, not me.”