Flexible financials roll off HP 3000 among redwoods

California group of companies tracks diverse enterprises with single financials package

In the heart of what’s called the Redwood Empire, a California firm has multiple business faces to turn toward the tops of the tall trees. Within a single corporation, the Humboldt Group operates a local weekly newspaper, prints and circulates a nationwide weekly magazine, runs two wineries as well as a retail photography store. They do it with an HP 3000 and one set of integrated financial solutions from Genesis Total Solutions (205.252.9446, www.gttsinc.com)

What’s remarkable about the relationship between the 150-person Humboldt and Genesis is that one reasonably-priced, 3000-based solution could be flexible enough to service the wide range of businesses. The Humboldt Group began business printing the Humboldt Beacon, a weekly newspaper serving the northern California city of Fortuna, about four hours from San Francisco. The terrain is crowded with hills and mountains, so television reception is unreliable. That led the company’s owners to look for good listings for satellite TV, the C-band dishes that became popular 10 years ago in such outlying areas. When they couldn’t find any listings, they started printing them.

“At the time, this community didn’t have cable,” explained Humboldt’s MIS Manager Joe Berliner, a 20-year veteran of HP 3000s. “We started Satellite TV Week magazine,” with a weekly press run of 200,000 copies. In time the Group added two winery operations in the Pasa Robles area of Napa Valley. Later on, it purchased a photography shop in Fortuna.

Last year the company’s longtime 3000 financial solution got slated for obsolescence, when Humboldt learned the software wasn’t going to be updated for Year 2000. Berliner started shopping for a replacement, including some prospective solutions apart from the Series 957 HP 3000 that was already running a two-million name circulation system from ARGI.

“That wasn’t my first choice, but it was something we were asked to investigate by upper management,” Berliner said of going outside the 3000. “We looked at some different things, and kind of got sticker shock, seeing what some of the networked applications would cost — things like Oracle Financials and such.” One solution would trigger e-mails when a trial balance changed. It was a nice feature, but that kind of complexity came at a high price.

Berliner said the company realized “those were certainly much more than we needed. One of the ways we could make the cost more reasonable was to stay on our current platform, the HP 3000.” The company already had terminals and its building was already wired for the system. The Humboldt Group started to look at 3000-based financial packages and came upon Genesis.

Berliner says “our financial requirements weren’t complex,” but then he outlines the scope of Humboldt Group operations: retail, publishing, manufacturing printed products, and agriculture. If the range of businesses seems diverse, the Genesis solution has managed to meet the varied financial requirements of interlocking companies.

PC-based financials were considered, but “they weren’t wasn’t scaled for the variety of companies we have and the way the duties are spread out over the groups,” Berliner said. “Any type of consolidation would have been a nightmare. We quickly dismissed that.”

The privately-held company operates with Genesis’ payables, receivables, payroll and general ledger systems, all launched at the start of 1999. It will be installing order processing and inventory modules from Genesis this year (the supplier also offers human resources, fixed assets and production control.) Accountants in the Group work with PC spreadsheets, and will be pulling information from the Genesis software into their desktops.

“They have a pretty complete package,” he said. “It could integrate with each of our companies, and we’ll be using the inventory system for example with our wineries, and also in our printing plant. It’ll work just fine for what our requirements are.” Winery applications that were reviewed “were lacking in the financial area, like in the payroll solution.”

During its search for a replacement package, the Humboldt Group “thought it might be time to look for a Windows NT solution,” Berliner said. “When we started looking at them, we realized some of the financial software companies had just released their NT versions, porting them over from other operating systems. Some of them weren’t quite ready yet — and the ones that were ready to go were pretty high priced.” Foreign currency exchange capabilities weren’t something the Group needed, for example, since it trades exclusively in dollars.

Keeping the 3000 as its financial hub helped save some of those dollars. “We avoided a major expense of putting in another network and acquiring another server,” Berliner said. The MIS staff only numbers three, “so we would have needed to hire an additional person to administer that NT server.”

The Humboldt Group began with its own home-grown 3000 applications in the 1980s, but Berliner said the firm has begun to rely on packaged applications with flexibility like the Genesis software.

“We realized that what we were doing wasn’t a lot different from what other companies were doing for accounting requirements,” he said. “We can purchase software and get an 80 percent solution, and make arrangements with the software company to make custom changes or enhancements. You can get a lot of versatility out of software packages nowadays.”