ROSE ACRE FARMS CASE HISTORY
Back to Case Studies A director of information technologies for a chicken farm? The very
idea must've raised some eyebrows at leading egg producer Rose Acre Farms. Based in Indiana since the 1940s, the privately held Rose Acre had grown to 23 farms in Indiana, Iowa and Missouri. But until recently
the individuals whose job was to travel from farm to farm checking on such things as egg quality, production rates and chicken health were only able to compare notes by -- well, by comparing notes. The extent of
their data sharing involved faxing handwritten reports to one another, or often trying to reach each other by phone. But with those individuals constantly on the move from farm to farm, such methods were
increasingly unsatisfactory. A flock manager monitoring fly counts and feed consumption, for example, had no way to check his findings against those of his counterpart who looked at egg production rates. When
Tim Neal came on board in January 1998 as Rose Acre's first information technologies director, he brought with him a new way of looking at things. "We had two dozen people who were essentially mobile
workers, roaming managers moving from farm to farm doing inspections and verifications, checking up on production values, egg weight, water and feed consumption, fly counts and so on," Neal recalled.
"But if they wanted to compare data with one another, or even compare today's data with data they'd collected earlier, they couldn't do it without physically traveling to one of a number of places where that
data -- often in the form of handwritten reports -- might be located. There was no central repository for comparison or correlation." The first step was to equip these mobile workers with laptop computers
and "get them all talking the same languages," Neal said. Those languages were Microsoft Word and Excel, two of the most widely-used computer programs for word processing and spreadsheets. In addition,
these workers were able to communicate with Rose Acre's existing and growing Oracle system. Once Rose Acre Farms' roaming managers had laptops, they needed a way to use those laptops to communicate and share
data with each other. Toward this end, Neal knew the most practical solution would be to set up AT&T dial-up access accounts, with -- because they were constantly on the move area to another -- a central
toll-free number for e-mail and Internet access. The network equipment and server part of the solution was less obvious. Neal knew he needed a web server and e-mail and web-page hosting, but he was also eager
to deploy a new technology called virtual private networks (VPNs) -- a means of providing common services to multiple locations as if they were on a single local network. Such services would include a directory
with names of all Rose Acre users, a common e-mail domain name (in this case goodegg.com), file sharing capability, firewalls (a way to isolate certain data or network segments) and access control. "I'd
been shopping around for separate firewall, e-mail and web hosting and VPN products," Neal said. "One leading vendor had a great firewall solution, but that alone cost $12,000. VPN services from another
vendor would be another $4,000-$5,000 a year. And that was without the software we'd need for our e-mail server and extranet web server. When you added it all up, we were looking at a $25,000 price tag."
Neal also knew that he didn't want to go with Microsoft's Remote Access Services (RAS). "I didn't want to manage and maintain a whole bunch of servers just to dial into a modem pool." Data Processing
Sciences (DPS), the Indianapolis-based computer and network consulting firm that Rose Acre had been using, suggested another approach -- a relatively new product from Silicon Valley startup FreeGate Corporation.
FreeGate in late 1997 had begun shipping its Multi-services Internet Gateway, which combined in a single system an IP router, web and e-mail servers, firewall, file transfer and name service, among other
capabilities. Furthermore, the company had just announced new VPN software for the system -- including a special "Remote Access VPN" version targeted at individual mobile workers. VPNs, which had been
used widely by large enterprises to save money on telecommuter dial-ins, had been impractical for smaller businesses because of their cost and technical complexity. FreeGate's software made VPNs affordable and
much easier to set up and administer. After the recommendation from DPS, and a visit to FreeGate's web site, Neal learned that the FreeGate engineering team included veterans of Cisco Systems and Raptor
Systems, top players in the internetworking and firewall markets, respectively. He was ready to order a FreeGate system. Within just a few hours of the FreeGate system's delivery in late April, Rose Acre Farms
had gone high-tech, with e-mail, web access and its own virtual private network. "I haven't found much hardware or software that has been so easy to deal with," Neal said. "I did not have to do very
much more than plug it in and do a little configuring. For what it costs, I have yet to see anything that gives a better bang for the buck." The VPN feature "gives me a secure method of tunneling
through our firewalls," he added. "Instead of having files on their own machines, remote users have shared access; they can tunnel in and see their files. Secure logins and passwords let them get into
temperature and water readings, for example, but not into confidential financial records." The traveling farm inspectors not only didn't take long to get used to being on-line; they've now come to regard
instant access as a given. "Our people's expectations have changed radically," Neal said. "As recently as three months ago it was a foregone conclusion that resolving an issue would take several
days. Now some of our locations don't have really fast dial-up connections, and users get impatient over a 10-second dial-up delay or a slow file download. Three months ago they had no on-line capability. Today
they're asking to upgrade from 28.8K to 56K modems." |
