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| Villa DiManno Bakery, located in Concord, Ontario has been a baker of buns, bread and European style products to retail and foodservice for over 20 years. To ensure freshness they are baking 7 days a week. Visit them on the web at www.villadimannobakery.com |
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Carmen Creek Gourmet Meats — With its origins in Bison ranching, Carmen Creek is a Calgary, Alberta based Bison producer and marketer to Canadian and US food distributors and European retailers and food service distributors. They are also the winners of Calgary’s 2005 Bennett Jones Emerging Enterprise of the Year Award. Did you know that Bison meat has just 1/3 the fat of Beef. For more info and great recipes, visit their website at www.carmencreek.com
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| Halenda's Fine Foods—Halenda’s Head Office in Oshawa recently chose Minotaur to help them manage their wholesale division which boasts a retail fresh meat counter and deli as well as the manufacturing plant where sausages and other freshly prepared deli items are produced and shipped to their four other retail locations—two more in Oshawa, one in Whitby and one at the St. Jacob’s Market. We hear that Halenda’s also offers a great Turkey—their supplier is fellow Minotaur customer Hayter’s Turkey, who have been running the Minotaur system at their Dashwood production facility for nearly two years. Customer referrals are an important part of how we at Minotaur sell as most prospective customers ask to speak to existing customers before they make their decision to buy. We very much appreciate the time you take to spread the word about Minotaur and we won’t forget your help the next time we quote you an enhancement. |
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Jensen Cheese — If you are ever in the Kingston area, stop by the Wilton Cheese factory for a tour of their facilities and sample some of their freshest cheeses located in their boutique. Jensen Cheese is one of Ontario’s oldest and most respected cheese factories having begun production in 1925. You can find their cheeses at area Farmers Markets and specialty deli’s across the province. Looking for a fundraising idea for your group? Visit their website at www.jensencheese.ca to find out how Jensen cheese can help. |
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| by Victor Boersma |
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In past issues of the Maze, we discussed the importance of performing backups. Essentially, your backups are your insurance policy in the event that your computer systems suffer any sort of catastrophic problems. Without a backup, you may need to resort to rebuilding your ERP system from scratch.
While we did discuss the importance of performing backups, we did not review the importance of properly managing the media (tapes, removable disks, etc.) on which you place your backups. We have, over the course of many years, unfortunately noted a few instances where people were religiously doing their backups, but because of their media management still had serious problems when they experienced data loss.
Essentially, people found that while they were doing their backups, they had never attempted to restore a backup. When they then attempted to do so in an emergency situation, they found that the backups they had been doing had no useful data on them.
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- In some cases, users had not been careful about whether files were closed or not. When files are left open, they are ignored by most backup programs.
- In some cases, users had been using the same tape (or set of tapes) for several years. Tapes wear out. After about 20 – 30 uses, they often cease to be reliable. In some cases, users had done backups with hardware compression and the catastrophe that destroyed their data destroyed their tape drive. Unfortunately, hardware compression is often proprietary and they could not find a duplicate tape drive to allow them to restore.
- In some cases, users had done their backups but stored all their backups in the computer room. Again, the catastrophe that destroyed their data destroyed their tapes.
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| There are of course many backup strategies outlined by various experts. In general, most of them are valid assuming they are followed properly. We tend to prefer the following simple backup strategy. |
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- Use a cycle of approximately 20 to 30 media – one for each day of the month.
- Each month, remove one media from the cycle and store it permanently. Often this will coincide with the fiscal period end. Of course, acquire a new media to replace the permanently stored one. Attempt to ensure that you are removing older media from the cycle, not the most recent one you added to the cycle.
- Each month, attempt to restore at least one backup of your data to a test system and attempt to use that data. Ideally, use a separate tape drive and computer from the one on which you performed the backup. If there are problems, rework your backup system. BE VERY CAREFUL NOT TO RESTORE OVER TOP OF YOUR LIVE DATA.
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Store a group of media off-site. Usually, the five media from the previous week will suffice. Then, if a major catastrophe such as a fire occurs, you have week old data available off-site.
Of course, the outlined system incurs some extra backup costs as you require a larger number of media than most people use and you are constantly replenishing the media. However, media costs are not that high. Most will cost between $10 and $100 per unit depending on the particular technology being used. So, the original media start-up cost is between $300 and $3000 for 30 tapes and between $10 and $100 per month for replacement costs. For many companies, that is relatively inexpensive insurance to ensure that they do not have to rebuild an ERP system from scratch. |
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As you can tell from the list of our newest customers, one of Minotaur’s specialties is in serving Food manufacturers and distributors. As a supplier to the food industry, Minotaur’s Judith Kirkness, VP of Sales, found the networking and professional development offered by the WFIM group to be very valuable. “This organization brings together women involved in all aspects of the food industry, from Owners to Food Scientists to Product Development Managers, so that they can learn from each other and benefit from professional development activities that are fun and educational.” Judith was invited to join the Board of Directors of WFIM this past summer and has been helping to plan these fabulous events. She would like to extend an invitation to all our customers in the food industry to attend an upcoming WFIM event as her guest (yes, a few men even venture out to events joining the room full of women). WFIM combines inspiring intelligent speakers with fabulous food and always allows for networking time. For a list of upcoming events, visit the WFIM website at www.wfim.on.ca and then call or email Judith at Judith@minotaursoftware.com to try an event on us. |
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Minotaur’s latest software offering takes us right onto your production floor where touchscreen technology lets you record inventory as it is made. Touchscreen abilities are ideal for messy production environments and places where employees are using gloves, making keyboard use impossible. This technology is up and running successfully at Minotaur customer Hazekamp Meats in Muskegon, Michigan.
At Hazekamp, as the pictures illustrate, boxes arrive at the end of their production conveyor line ready to be weighed and labeled. Minotaur monitors the activity on the scale and when the operator presses the button it captures the catch weight of the box producing a lot controlled bar code label which is applied to the box. Since Minotaur is a real time system, inventory is updated immediately and available for sale. Could this technology help your business better automate your production recording? If so, contact your Minotaur Project Manager and we’ll be happy to arrange a demonstration at our office. |
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| The next time your business orders cheques, you’ll notice that the banks have changed how the date is shown in the upper right corner. The new forms will require a change in your cheque printing to reformat the date to a numeric YYMMDD rather than a written month. This will require an update of your Minotaur program. It is most cost effective to have this change completed as part of another update you are receiving, so be sure to contact Minotaur right away when your company orders new cheques. |
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