Background

Owned by Smurfit, the Sequoia Voting Systems facility in Exeter, CA and two American Litho plants in Hayward and Sacramento were sharing one copy of Primac® . When the American Litho plants were sold, the Primac® system and the existing IBM H50 UNIX server went with the sale. Thus, Sequoia needed to install a new server and an additional copy of the Primac® software and separate the security and production accounting systems and all the related Primac® files. One month prior to the cutover, Primac® began working on a plan with Sequoia MIS Manager, Richard Armentrout.

Sequoia Voting Systems provides full service voting solutions to various local and state governments including software, ballots, punch cards, optical scanning and Touch Screen voting systems. The plant in Exeter is a printing facility for the punch cards, running Primac® to manage their entire operation -- from accounting to inventory to scheduling and job tracking.

Objectives

Sequoia Voting Systems was moving their entire Primac® production management system over to a new IBM RS/6000 P620 server. The cutover needed to be scheduled with exact timing dependent on the date of the sale and the closing fiscal period. Equipment needed to be ordered and pre-loaded with Primac® software. And, most important, this had to be done without interrupting or affecting employees using Primac® at either company to conduct their daily operations and serve their customers.

Solution

A written procedure was developed that included everything Sequoia would need to continue production without any down-time, including punch orders, invoicing, job costs, and shop floor data collection. Once the P620 was ordered and delivered to Vercom, it was preloaded with the new copy of Primac® then shipped to Sequoia. Once that was installed and Sequoia's users cut over to it, their Primac® had to be removed from the H50 at American Litho, again without interrupting daily processing.

Results

At the conclusion of these steps, each of the two entities was running its own Primac® , with its own files, on separate IBM servers. No down-time was experienced and the transition took place seamlessly. Primac® 's team implemented a new system without disrupting current business and set up the new system to have scalability features that will allow for further expansion in the future.

Primac® 's turnkey business management solution has demonstrated its usability, scalability and most importantly, its flexibility. This system is so flexible that it can be adapted for other industries if needed and can have changes made to it with a truly seamless transition.