Alamo Group

Alamo Group designs, manufactures, distributes and services high quality
equipment for infrastructure maintenance, agriculture and other applications.

Products include truck and tractor mounted mowing and other vegetation maintenance equipment, street sweepers, snow removal equipment, excavators, vacuum trucks, other industrial equipment, agricultural implements, forestry equipment, after-market parts and services.

The Company operates plants in North America, Europe, Australia and Brazil.

Background

Alamo began using JD Edwards in 2001.

The company upgraded from EnterpriseOne 9.1 to 9.2 in 2018.

Key challenges

• Performance issues were being experienced by the JD Edwards users.
  The number of interactions with the helpdesk were increasing.
• The JD Edwards system was gradually slowing down.
• Routine reports were taking too long to run.
  (For example, MRP was running well into the night and at times into the next morning)

The story prior to Purge-it!

Alamo had done a limited amount of General Ledger and Inventory archiving using the JD Edwards system tools with the help of their in-house developers.  However, there were concerns about this situation and recognition within Alamo that they needed to look at external third-party tools for support with archiving.

Alamo’s concerns with their internal approach

1.  Staff sometimes move to different roles, leave the company or retire – if and when this happens, the knowledge about how the in-house archiving is built and works then moves with the employee and potentially is lost forever.
   
   
2.  The scope of the ongoing archiving requirement went far beyond what could comfortably be handled internally.
   In reality, the in-house developers have a number of priority projects to manage hence it was virtually impossible to dedicate in-house resource uniquely to archiving.
   
   
3.  Alamo’s heaviest use of JD Edwards is order entry. This data had never been tackled prior to using Purge-it!

Selecting the right solution

The company looked at three third party archiving products.  After speaking with existing Klik IT customers the decision was taken to purchase Purge-it!

Frank Jimenez, Systems Administrator at Alamo explained “all the Klik IT customer references spoke very favourably about the Purge-it! archiving solution and the Klik IT customer service. This reaffirmed our decision to go with Purge-it!”

In Alamo’s early years there was a relatively small amount of data in the system.  However, in subsequent years the rate of growth was much greater leading to a natural but noticeable rise in the volumes of data in the JD Edwards system.

The situation at Alamo never became critical, nonetheless there was a definite steady slowing down of the system.  At times, the business users were struggling to get sales orders entered and searched in a timely manner.  Complaints to the helpdesk were rising with users citing increased response times in the JD Edwards system.

Getting started with Purge-it!

“The Purge-it! training Klik IT provided was very good.  The software is intuitive and easy to learn.  Within 3 months the software was installed, the implementation was complete and we were able to independently use the product for archiving.”

“The upgrade to EnterpriseOne 9.2 was completely painless and smooth.  We had virtually no problems.  We know if we encounter difficulties then we can reach out to Klik IT and they are always there and willing to help.”

“We’ve not needed to use the easy reversal functionality, but it provides a good level of comfort to know that it’s there should we require it.”

Frank Jimenez, Systems Administrator at Alamo