Company
Pervasive and Data Access Help McFarland Cascade's Revenue Reach New Heights
"McFarland Cascade has more than tripled in gross revenue in the years we've been running on Pervasive and Data Access products. I rest well at night knowing that we have a reliable infrastructure in place to support our management requirements."
Paul Richmond, IS Project Leader, McFarland Cascade
About McFarland Cascade
Starting in 1916 as a producer of wood utility poles, McFarland Cascade is one of today's leaders in diversified wood products with 350 employees and more than $150 million in yearly revenue. Headquartered in Tacoma, Wash., McFarland Cascade serves customers located throughout the United States, Canada, Far East, Middle East and Pacific Rim. The company is one of North America's largest manufacturers of pressure-treated utility poles and is also involved in the production and distribution of consumer and industrial lumber products.
Business Challenge
As McFarland Cascade grew into one of the largest manufacturers in its industry, so too did its business practices. Its IT infrastructure had to be prepared to effectively manage the increasing amount of data that's vital for daily business operations. For example, at the end of each month, more than 600 reports are generated for distribution to its internal and external customers. This can cause serious stress to a client/server backend if it's not up to the task.
Adding to the complexity, McFarland Cascade had an 11-year-old, comprehensive legacy application central to its operations. Any new solutions would have to work with and enhance this existing, business-critical application.
To stay competitive, McFarland Cascade continues to improve its business infrastructure with the best solutions. Any solution implemented must offer reliability, high performance and scalability.
The Pervasive and Data Access Solution
McFarland Cascade first selected Pervasive Software® technology in 1993 when it was the only client/server solution available to support Data Access Worldwide's character-based DataFlex® application development system. Three years ago McFarland Cascade began to lay the groundwork to upgrade the company's legacy system to Microsoft Windows using Visual DataFlex (VDF). While large legacy system upgrades are often frustrated by the design limitations of the original tools and data structures, Richmond was pleased to discover that the combination of VDF and Pervasive enabled them to quickly work around many of these problems. As McFarland Cascade continues the process of moving onto VDF, Richmond says they are extremely pleased with the productivity of the development environment as well as with the rich tool set available. They now rely on the combination of VDF and Pervasive.SQL as the backbone of their application development platform - experiencing exceptional reliability and performance.
Bottom Line
The reliability of Pervasive and Data Access' offerings has served McFarland Cascade well over the years. Richmond believes it's the most inexpensive, low maintenance and easy to configure back-end available. Currently, 24/7 backups are being performed under Pervasive's continuous operations mode, and the company has experienced a virtually perfect reliability record with only two data corruption events in seven years - both attributed to hardware failure at the server.
Since performance has always been of primary importance to McFarland Cascade, the fact that the monthly accounting cycle typically closes with its financials published in four to five business days is seen as phenomenal. Richmond's group has also been able to provide a significantly higher level of functionality within their applications with the new tool set. And the users are finding the new visual interface much more familiar and intuitive.
With help from the Pervasive and Data Access solutions, McFarland Cascade's applications have grown from the original sales, purchasing, accounting and inventory control systems to encompass highly tailored solutions for managing the production of the company's wood supply chain, CRM, freight analysis, document imaging, EDI, customer call reporting and many other aspects of the business. This reliable, high-performing solution is enabling McFarland Cascade to worry less about its business infrastructure and more on continuing the company's impressive revenue growth.
Data Access Worldwide's president and CEO Charles Casanave endorses McFarland Cascade's decision to rely on Pervasive.SQL for powering their business-critical applications. "As a provider of advanced tools and technologies for mission-critical corporate applications like McFarland Cascade's, we encounter a very broad range of requirements for embeddable data management software," he said. "Corporate customers demand scalability, high performance, unshakable reliability and low cost of ownership, and Pervasive.SQL delivers on all points."
About Data Access Worldwide
Data Access Worldwide develops advanced, productivity enhancing software tools for professional
application developers. The company's WebApp Server, Visual DataFlex and DataFlex products form an
advanced, multi-platform, technology suite for building reliable, high-performance, component-based
database applications for desktop, client-server, Web, e-commerce and wireless environments. Over
400,000 WebApp, Visual DataFlex and DataFlex licenses have been delivered to application customers
worldwide in accounting, healthcare, finance, insurance, hospitality, manufacturing, transportation
and government sectors. Established in 1976, Data Access Worldwide is headquartered in Miami, Fla.,
with regional offices in The Netherlands, Brazil and Australia. A network of distributors and channel
partners deliver and support the company's products in over 20 countries. For more information
visit www.DataAccess.com.
About Pervasive Software®
Pervasive Software is a leading global data-management company powering the success of application developers by providing solutions that deliver the industry's best combination of performance, reliability and low administration costs. Pervasive's strength is evidenced by the size and diversity of its customer base, serving tens of thousands of customers with hundreds of thousands of end-users in nearly every vertical market around the world. Founded in 1994, Pervasive sells its products into more than 150 countries and is based in Austin, Texas, with offices in Europe. More information may be found on the Web at http://www.pervasive.com.
For more information
To learn more about Pervasive Software and our solutions, please visit www.pervasive.com. To reach the North American
sales office, call 1.800.287.4383, extension 2. For Latin, Central and South America, Australia and New Zealand, call
+1.512.231.6000. In Europe, for Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland
and the United Kingdom, call +800.12.12.34.34. For any other European, Middle Eastern, African or Asian countries
(excluding Japan), call +32.70.23.37.61. For Japan, please call +81.3.3293.5300, or visit www.pervasive.co.jp.
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