Fabick Cat
            

Fabick Cat is a tractor dealer that specializes in the distribution of Caterpillar® equipment. The company’s product line consists of more than 300 machines. It features articulated trucks, backhoe loaders, compactors, front shovels, hydraulic excavators, motor graders, paving equipment and off-highway trucks. It also offers a wide range of rentals. Thecompany was established in 1917 and maintains a facility in Fenton, Miss., U.S.

The late John Fabick, Sr., founded the first Fabick Company in 1917, merchandising Cletrac Crawler Tractors and John Deere® farm implements. With only three employees and one small store on South Grand Avenue in St. Louis, Miss., Fabick set out to “build the greatest service organization of its kind.” To achieve this goal, he adopted as his company creed “to ever serve our customers better.” In 1921, Fabick expanded his business by including the Model A and Model S Crawler Tractors manufactured by C.L. Best. Four years later, C.L. Best and Holt Manufacturing merged to form the organization that is known today as Caterpillar Inc., the world’s leading manufacturer of construction machinery. From this early beginning, the association between Fabick and Caterpillar Inc. has grown hand-in-hand and continues to thrive. Today, there are more than 1,100 employees including members of the Fabick family’s third, fourth and fifth generations, working together under the active leadership of the founder’s great-grandson, Douglas Fabick, as CEO and Dealer Principal along with Jeré Fabick serving as President and co-Dealer Principal. What makes Fabick Cat unique is not only its size, but its outstanding people, support and facilities bound together by the single concept of total service capability for the equipment owner.

Challenge

Fabick Cat has an IBM® AS/400 based system order processing system that is used across many installments. After acquiring a second Caterpillar dealership, an issue arose when Fabick Cat realized the dealership had its own custom-written order processing system running on OpenVMS with RMS files. What Fabick Cat wanted was a solution to provide a data warehouse for both systems. This would provide uniform reporting and analytics for both companies. The initial plan was to FTP files from the OpenVMS server and load them into SQL Server. The amount of data downloaded every day and the manual nature of this approach caused concerns. Dave Kramer, IT Manager at Fabick Cat, after a positive experience using CONNX previously to access RMS data, decided to call on CONNX yet again. CONNX had just the solution to meet their demands.

Solution

CONNX DataSync is a micro-batch, low-latency CDC solution that keeps data fresh and upto-date without impacting the performance of data sources. DataSync enables companies to maintain data warehouses with minimal effort or system requirements, delivering near real-time data integration and continuous refreshes by incrementally updating only those records that have changed. Companies can eliminate the need for large and resourceintensive bulk data refreshes with DataSync’s highly efficient and market-proven design. Arnie Strouse, the lead analyst on the Fabick Cat project said, “DataSync is able to perform most syncs in seconds. Only copying the changed data has not impacted the performance on our OpenVMS server for interactive users.” With the database synchronization software, companies can schedule updates to optimize system performance based on individual needs. Depending on the demand, you can schedule updates for lower-use periods, such as after normal business hours, or as frequently as every minute when you need the more up-to-date data. DataSync is fast to implement, easy to use, versatile, scalable and minimizes project risk.