Anthony Marano Company

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Chicago’s Largest Independent Food Distributor Standardizes on Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST® and PRIMERGY® Servers and ETERNUS® Storage for Mainframe Reliability and Redundancy

“We switched to Fujitsu because we needed the highest reliability and most redundancy available in a Microsoft-supported platform.”

– Chris Nowak, Chief Technology Officer, The Anthony Marano Company

In 1950, Anthony and Josephine Marano founded The Anthony Marano Company, a wholesale distributor of fresh produce serving Chicago and the Upper Midwest. At the helm of the company for most of his life, Marano has seen six children and a third generation of grandchildren join the company - all dedicated to the family’s commitment of service excellence.
Though rooted in family tradition, the company has eagerly embraced technology to meet the changing needs of its retail, food service, and wholesale customers. Turning vision into reality, Anthony Marano has built a state-of-the-art technology infrastructure using Fujitsu server and storage solutions that has set the company apart from its competition.

Real-time Inventory Management Sets Anthony Marano Apart

Open seven days a week, 360 days a year and with annual sales of over $200 million, Anthony Marano has built a cutting edge facility to efficiently move more than one million cases of fresh produce in and out of the building each month. But success has not come without its challenges. The logistics surrounding the perishable agricultural commodity business are very complex. In fact, 70 to 80 percent of Anthony Marano’s 2,000 to 3,000 daily orders need to be picked, packed, and shipped within hours. And with more than 1,400 products from around the world in the warehouse at any given time, each with varying shelf lives and storage needs, inventory management and prod-uct pricing are complicated to say the least.

To address these challenges, Anthony Marano automated its paper-based front office operations with a customized real-time inventory management application that was built using the Microsoft.NET framework, which runs on a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database and is seamlessly integrated into the com-pany’s Microsoft Dynamics financial management software. “With a real-time view of inventory, our sales staff can be very authoritative regarding produce availability and pricing, and customer or supplier commitments,” explains Chris Nowak, chief technology officer at Anthony Marano.

Up-to-the-minute access to inventory data sets Anthony Marano apart from the competition, many of whom do not have the infrastructure to support real-time inventory control. “Real-time knowledge of our inventory helps us respond to our customers’ needs faster than the competition, and boosts our reputation as a distributor our customers can count on,” Nowak adds. Real-time inventory management also enables Anthony Marano to price more effectively, a major advantage in a busi-ness where pricing varies from customer to customer depending on requirements, volume, the nature of the relationship, and market fluctuation.

Complex Business Requires Powerful Technology

With its new real-time inventory management application at the heart of its business, Anthony Marano required a fast and extremely reliable IT infrastructure. After a system board issue almost shut down the entire business, Nowak knew it was time to make a change in the company’s IT infrastructure. “With the new real-time inventory management solution in play, technology has become critical to the cadence of our business,” explained Nowak. “We switched to Fujitsu because we needed the highest reliability and most redundancy available in a Microsoft-supported platform.”

Anthony Marano began implementing a new IT infrastructure centered on a Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 540 enterprise class server that runs the Microsoft Server 2003 Operating Sys-tem and is optimized for the Intel® Itanium® platform. The PRIMEQUEST 540 server has two partitions. The first runs the company’s real-time inventory management software and the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database and the second partition runs the company’s file services, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 reporting services, and Microsoft Dynamics financial manage-ment software. With a compact chassis design, the PRIME-QUEST 540 boasts a small footprint—an important selling feature for Anthony Marano. “A comparable server model from a competitor is 50 percent larger than the PRIMEQUEST, and because space is at a premium in our data center, size was a consideration for us,” explains Nowak.

The company also purchased two PRIMERGY RX300 S3 servers, with one running Microsoft Exchange 2007 and the other running the control systems for the PRIMEQUEST 540 server. Finally, Anthony Marano selected the Fujitsu ETERNUS4000 Model 300 as its Storage Area Network (SAN) solution, using it to boot the PRIMEQUEST 540 server and store approximately two Terabytes of data.

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