Satisfying 25,000 users

Communications News, April, 1998

A unified e-mail system enhances communications at Cargill while reducing support requirements and costs.

Until Cargill turned to a unified e-mail system, its melange of 16 e-mail systems simply could not deliver data fast enough. The maze of messaging technologies had become an administrative nightmare for company's IT team. The decentralized messaging-support staff found it almost impossible to understand and remember the idiosyncrasies of all 16 systems.

Cargill, a diversified global company based in Minnetonka, Minn., is a merchandiser, processor, and distributor of agricultural and industrial commodities. It employs 79,000 people at nearly 1,000 locations in more than 65 countries worldwide. A quarter of a million messages flow through its network each day.

"We have 25,000 e-mail users, and 75% of them log on during any given day," says Larry Teckenbrock, senior technical analyst with Cargill. "We tend to use e-mail more than the average company because we're so globally dispersed."

The company manufactures steel and also trades and processes a wide range of commodities, including grains and petroleum.

Another Cargill operation, commodities trading and futures brokerage, focuses on markets such as grain, coffee, cotton, petroleum, rubber, and sugar.

"In our grain business, e-mail is the traders' main software application," says Teckenbrock. "To move the commodities, they need real-time information on the movement of shipments and barges. What they are doing is time-critical. Losing even a few minutes could mean losing millions of dollars."

Cargill decided to replace its old messaging system with Lotus cc:Mail and HP OpenMail, Hewlett-Packard's client/ server messaging infrastructure product. Lotus cc:Mail is the Unix client, and HP OpenMail is the server. The system, in place since 1996, meets the company's stringent real-time communications needs while reducing e-mail support requirements and costs and assuring quick resolution to problems.

Currently, Cargill operates 145 HP OpenMail messaging servers worldwide. The company manages the servers from locations in Minnetonka, near Minneapolis; Sao Paolo, Brazil; Cobham, England; and Singapore. The system runs on a combination of Hewlett Packard UP/UX and IBM AIX operating systems.

When Cargill switched to the new system, it reorganized support staff to correspond to the Unix server layout. Today, the company deploys three levels of support with fewer than 200 analysts and managers worldwide, including onsite administrators. Before the change, there were twice that number.

The top level of support, at corporate headquarters, is made up of six technical analysts who assure integrity of the directories and consistency of the software to the servers in Asia Pacific, Europe, and Latin America. The middle level is six additional people distributed among Brazil, England, and Singapore, who provide day-to-day support for e-mail users. The third level consists of individual on-site.

Supporting the new system posed a challenge for Cargill's IT analysts, because the company had not used Unix previously. However, because the new system involves only one e-mail system and two Unix operating systems, training has been straightforward.

"Narrowing it down to two operating systems streamlined the rollout and ongoing support for the new e-mail system," Teckenbrock says. "There is now a narrower scope of technical information that the analysts need to learn and use."

To bring the IT staff up to speed on the new system, Cargill designed a curriculum that features classes in OpenMail "basic administration" and "internals." The top- and middle-level analysts took the classes, taught by HP, during the implementation of the Unix system. As new analysts join Cargill, they also take the classes. Middle-level Cargill analysts who have taken the classroom training train the onsite support staff members.

The basic administration class provides an overview of OpenMail, including how the mail flows and how the directory is connected throughout the e-mail system. The internals class is more technical and explores in more detail how the e-mail system functions.

In 1994, Cargill began to roll out the new e-mail system. It began with six pilot sites and eventually implemented the system company-wide. The rollout concluded, on time and under budget, in September 1996.

Since then, the support strategy has proven itself. "We have not experienced a situation where a top-level support person has needed to go on-site to fix an e-mail problem," Teckenbrock says.