Running a large food service is no picnic. Thousands of details directly impact a food service company's ability to deliver quality products and service and to make a fair profit. To help institutional and commercial food service organizations manage critical activities, The CBORD Group created a suite of software applications using Sybase PowerBuilder and SQL Anywhere Studio from Sybase's iAnywhere subsidiary.

"Our systems were originally DOS-based, but we knew we needed to convert them to Windows, and we chose Sybase technology to help us do that," said Leo Tohill, product manager for The CBORD Group. "Additionally, we wanted to integrate our systems so that food service providers with customers in different markets didn't have to run separate systems for each group of customers. By integrating our systems, clients' data can now be stored in one database and common information such as food definitions and recipes can be shared across their enterprises."

CBORD also wanted to allow its clients to create and run their own reports using popular desktop tools like Sybase InfoMaker®, Microsoft Excel and Access and Seagate Crystal Reports.

Why CBORD Chose Sybase
To convert its DOS-based systems to Windows, CBORD wanted an object-oriented, client/server, rapid development tool with a proven track record.

"We compared the features of PowerBuilder versus Visual Basic and some other tools, and concluded that PowerBuilder was the best choice," Tohill said. "It offered support for object-oriented programming long before Visual Basic, and we saw PowerBuilder's data window as a powerful development component."

CBORD also turned to Sybase for the database it would embed in its systems.

"SQL Anywhere Studio provided what we wanted in terms of a robust solution that could be easily managed," Tohill said. "We can't sell a system that requires a DBA to go out to every site to maintain the database. Our systems have to deploy relatively maintenance free. We looked at other database solutions briefly, but when we saw their cost and DBA requirements, that was the end of it. It didn't take us long to choose SQL Anywhere."

The other factors that made SQL Anywhere the obvious choice were its support for stored procedures and triggers, its synchronization capability and its support for multiple operating systems. "Stored procedures are often the best way to implement business logic and various functionality," Tohill said. "As far as the synchronization capability, we have a number of clients who have a corporate site where they maintain a core set of corporate recipes, as well as numerous food service delivery sites.

"SQL Anywhere enables our clients to develop and test their recipes, store them in their consolidated corporate SQL Anywhere database and then, as needed, replicate them to their delivery sites," he said.

System Saves Time and Money
Baptist Memorial Hospital Medical Center in Memphis, Tenn. uses CBORD's Foodservice Manager System (FMS) for purchasing and inventory management. The 653-bed hospital and its 65-bed sister hospital, Baptist Memorial Collierville, also plan to use the system's menu and forecasting features.

"FMS is very easy to learn and use," said Karen Burnett, the hospital's food nutrition services information systems manager. "Because it's a Windows-based system, it's all point and click. The built-in tutorials enable our staff to pretty much train themselves in an hour or less."

Using FMS, Baptist Memorial can very efficiently manage the purchasing and inventory of the thousands of food items for patient and hospital cafeteria meals. By standardizing on specific items and vendors, the hospital is able to maximize its buying power.

FMS makes the ordering and receiving process more accurate and less time consuming. "It gives us an accurate, real-time result of our order," Burnett said. "We know immediately what's out of stock at a particular vendor and we can request a substitution or order another item instead. On the receiving end of the process, as deliveries are made, they can be compared against the original order and invoices can be modified to reflect any missing or damaged items or price discrepancies. Finally, where it used to take us five hours or more to do inventory, FMS enables us to do it in an hour and a half."

"Before CBORD, we worked a lot harder," adds Burnett. "In terms of the system itself, it's very user-friendly and very reliable for the functionality our hospital uses."

"Sybase technology—both PowerBuilder and SQL Anywhere Studio—is the heart of our applications," Tohill said. "Sybase has met our expectations and enabled us to develop a very feature-rich set of applications. SQL Anywhere has proven to be a terrific product. It has a great feature set, it's stable, easy to install, easy to use and low maintenance. We've deployed it to hundreds of sites and it has proven to be robust. Overall, it's been one of the best quality pieces of software I've worked with in my career."