Fike Corporation Uses ESEND To Put Out Their Remote Distribution Fire

Fike Corporation is a leader in the design and manufacture of Process and Life Safety products. They manufacture and distribute rupture disk products and accessories, as well as explosion protection products and services. They also offer a wide range of fire detection, suppression, and control systems typically found in computer rooms, telecommunications facilities, electronic switching stations, automotive plants, textile mills, and turbine generators— just to name a few.

Fike has been using JD Edwards World Software since 1995. Currently, they are using a phased approach to implement World at one of their smaller subsidiaries. Creating, setting up, and attaching printers and output queues to each IBM® System iTM didn’t seem to make a lot of sense given the size of their operation. Instead, Fike started exploring alternatives to address their printing needs. What product would let them send spooled data from the System i to an e-mail address? Fike was also looking for a better method to refresh and restore data on their test System i with production data.

Fike found the solution for both issues with ESEND,TM the file distribution, archive, and forwarding solution from Help/Systems. ESEND supports both e-mail and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) routing of System i data to remote users. ESEND commands allow ad hoc selection and routing of files and spooled output from other sources on the System i.

Jim Rubino, Senior Programmer Analyst for Fike Corporation, describes the implementation. “We currently use a forms design package that gives us the ability to e-mail spooled files, but the address has to be on the form. With ESEND we can e-mail spooled files without needing System i programming changes.”

Fike had been using backup tapes to restore data. Now, they use ESEND to restore many files. Jim explains, “We can refresh one of our smaller production environments to our test System i in less than fifteen minutes. This process used to take almost an hour using our standard refresh procedures.”

Jim’s decision to use ESEND was also influenced by the excellent customer service provided by the Help/ Systems sales and support team. As he describes it, “The Help/Systems pre-sales support was wonderful. My sales contacts were very knowledgeable, but if they couldn’t help me, they put me in touch with someone who could. Even after the sale and installation, my sales contacts have been wonderful to deal with.”

In the end, Fike evaluated ESEND and within a few weeks, they were off and running with little or no assistance. For Fike, the only thing easier than dousing a fire is using ESEND.