Flavored with convergence

While voice over IP is the flavor of the month at many companies these days, ice cream maker Wells' Dairy focused on another ingredient - video - as the base of a convergence initiative that promises to increase employee productivity and improve customer service.

The country's largest family-owned dairy processor, Wells' makes yogurt, ice cream and frozen treats for distribution under the popular Blue Bunny name and private labels worldwide. It churns out 100 million gallons of ice cream annually, making it the largest maker of ice cream in one location - and giving this 90-year-old company boasting rights to having made its home city of Le Mars, Iowa, the "Ice Cream Capital of the World."

But Wells' Dairy executives want the company known for more than its Rocky Road and Bomb Pops. They want the dairy industry to associate the company with being on the leading edge. Indeed, the company is recognized widely for its two state-of-the-art ice cream plants in Le Mars, home to most of its 2,600 employees. Now Wells' Dairy is turning to IT to promote the leading edge. It would like to extend the enterprise network to customers and business partners through business processes such as vendor-managed warehousing, supply-chain management and applications such as IP video, says Jim Kirby, senior network architect.

With such uses in mind, the company last fall invested $300,000 in upgrading its network for convergence, and adding redundancy and fault-tolerance into the backbone. Kirby says he's accounted for switch failures and "acts of God," through a five-zone triangulated network that runs over the company's private fiber metropolitan-area network in Le Mars.

"We are running an all-glass Gigabit Ethernet core, with a redundant distribution layer and redundant paths to our access switches," Kirby says.

He stresses the predictable nature of the network. "I can determine on a piece of paper how each packet will flow from one point on the network to any other point. That's a network manager's dream. It makes network troubleshooting so much easier," he says.

Not that Kirby and his team need to react often to problems on the new network. Kirby estimates as much as a 30% drop in network-related help desk tickets since the upgrade, while the number of access ports has grown by 50%. And when problems have cropped up, help desk technicians have been able to solve them quickly, so much so that Wells' Dairy has seen a 90% drop in the time it takes for troubleshooting, he adds.

"Fundamental issues - like a routing table getting messed up and a piece of the network disappearing for an unknown reason?" says Kirby, recalling an outage the company experienced before migrating to the new network. "They just don't happen anymore."

Network World honors Wells' Dairy as a 2002 User Excellence Award runner-up for its convergence project that makes its workforce more efficient and the network more resilient, while better serving its customers and business partners.

Premium network
High network availability is a must for Wells' Dairy. At the company's two ice cream plants in Le Mars, mix operators input production and cleaning directions into local PCs, which relay the program data over the network to the holding tanks, storage towers, pipes, vats, pumps and valves - the "stainless steel forest," Kirby quips - involved in each run. If Super Fudge Brownie is on the mix menu, the program dictates how much milk and chocolate are released into what mixing vats and when the brownies are added. By policy, mix operators program no more than four hours' worth of production runs at a time. Should network connectivity at the plants be lost for more than that duration, production would freeze, Kirby says.

"We have a top-of-the-line infrastructure here that we can sell to our customers. We can tell them, 'We are a leading-edge company when it comes to information systems, and that means we can make your product more cheaply and efficiently than anyone else,' " he says.

Video meetings are one of IT's big thrusts, with the team pushing IP video to the desktops of account managers, regional sales managers and other power users in and out of town. Besides the ice cream plants, Wells' Dairy owns a milk plant, corporate offices, a recycling center and even an airport hangar in Le Mars. Elsewhere, it operates a milk plant and freezer in Omaha, Neb.; distribution centers in El Paso, Texas, and Phoenix; and sales offices scattered across the country.

Kirby tells of an account manager in Joplin, Mo., who recently began using desktop video to deliver biweekly updates on a major buyer to company executives rather than holding in-person briefings. Previously, the company dispatched the corporate jet to bring him to Le Mars for those updates, at a cost of about $4,000 per month, he says. The company is negotiating with at least one third party on running video meetings over the Wells' Dairy network, Kirby says.

But IP video is not just for the far-flung, Kirby says. The IT team is also updating all of its conference rooms in Le Mars with IP-based videoconferencing gear with the expectation that local employees will start holding video meetings rather than meeting face to face. As it is now, some plant personnel hop across town as many as four times per day to participate in daily production and other meetings, Kirby says. Giving those employees the opportunity to meet via IP video sessions would be a huge time saver, he adds.

For now, Kirby supports about one IP video meeting weekly. "We are still building a comfort level within management for using the technology. We'd love for them to use it everyday, but we're taking it slow," he says.

Besides video meetings, Wells' Dairy is streaming CNN "Headline News," corporate information and emergency notifications to more than a dozen breakrooms in its ice cream plants and other corporate buildings. It uses a hybrid model of IP multicasting and analog delivery, Kirby says. The video streams are multicast to a main breakroom in each ice cream plant, then are pushed over analog copper lines to the remaining rooms.

"We think of this as a benefit for the break room - a real employee morale- and productivity-booster," Kirby says.

Enterprise IP voice, so often the convergence driver, is a long-term goal, Kirby says. "Obviously legacy PBXs are going the way of the dinosaur, and IP telephony is the future. We buy the hype, but we'll take our time and make sure we make the right decision," he says.

Truth is, he adds, choosing an IP telephony platform will be somewhat political, with the voice managers favoring Avaya and the network guys Cisco, with little differentiation among products. But more than that, he stresses, the company's legacy Definity PBX will "work great for the next 10 years." The important thing, he adds, is that the network is in place to support VoIP just as it would any other application.