Starting as a producer of wood utility poles in Sandpoint, Idaho in 1916, McFarland Cascade has grown into a producer of diversified wood products with 350 employees and over $120 million in revenues. Needless to say, their business processes have had to grow with the company, as well, and central to their strategy has been relying on the combination of Visual DataFlex and Pervasive.SQL as the backbone of their application development platform.

Now headquartered in Tacoma, Washington, McFarland Cascade serves customers located throughout the United States, Canada, the Far East, the Middle East, and the Pacific Rim. The company is one of North America’s largest manufacturers of pressure treated utility poles, and is also involved in the production and distribution of consumer and industrial lumber products.

Paul Richmond, IS project leader for McFarland Cascade, described how the company’s dependence on a solid application development and deployment framework is essential to its business operations.

"Central to our operations is a comprehensive legacy application," Richmond said, "which we purchased originally from Data Modes over 11 years ago, and we’ve continued to modify and add features under the character mode versions of DataFlex. About half way through that C/M development cycle we moved our mission critical application onto the Pervasive backend where it has performed with exceptional reliability and performance ever since."

Into the Visual DataFlex Arena

"We have been pleased to discover that we are able to work around many of these problems with the combination of VDF, Pervasive, and more recently, Crystal Reports,"Richmond said. "As we continue the process of moving onto VDF, we are extremely pleased with the productivity of this development environment as well as the rich tool set provided."

Richmond recalled how the move to Visual DataFlex, and as a result the delivery of a visually rich Windows GUI, surprised the company’s users. "One of the first VDF applications we rolled out to our end users prompted a user to ask, ’Where did we buy this program?’ Our IS development team enjoyed a good laugh as the visual program was simply a functional replacement for an existing character mode application with a standardized Windows look and feel. Our end users are finding the new visual interface much more familiar and intuitive. We have also been able to provide a significantly higher level of functionality within our applications with the new tool set. VDF has raised the bar."

A Long History with Pervasive.SQL

"We selected Pervasive when it was the only client/server solution available to support DataFlex. We originally used Flexquarter’s DataFlex for Btrieve modified run time, but we have subsequently converted to run on Data Access’ Connectivity Kit for Pervasive.SQL. We are extremely pleased with our current client/server solution. We enjoy virtually a perfect reliability record with only two data corruption events in seven years, both attributed to hardware failure at the server. We currently run 24x7 with backups being performed under Pervasive’s continuous operations mode."

Performance has always been of primary importance to McFarland Cascade. The company runs over 600 reports at month-end for distribution to their customer base as well as internal uses. Says Richmond, "These reports can seriously stress a client/server back end that’s not up to the task. Pervasive handles this wonderfully. Our monthly accounting cycle normally closes with our financials published in 4-5 business days after the end of the month. This is phenomenal!"

Dealing with Growth and Diversity

McFarland Cascade’s applications have grown from the original sales, purchasing, accounting, and inventory control systems to encompass highly tailored solutions for managing the production of the company’s wood supply chain, CRM, freight analysis, document imaging, EDI, customer call reporting and many other aspects of their business. Richmond notes that, "We have never ’run into a wall’ with the combination of DataFlex and Pervasive."

Richmond’s team currently supports up to 95 users with all remote locations being supported through Citrix connections. The Pervasive system runs on a Windows 2000 cluster with quad CPU’s and 4GB of RAM on the servers. The data resides on a large SANS serving the cluster.

Data Access Worldwide’s chief technical officer, John Tuohy, endorses the development path that McFarland Cascade has taken.

"I’ve known Paul for years through our close association with the DISD conference, which Paul skillfully headed this year," Tuohy said. "I’ve always considered Paul to be the model of a corporate developer. He is forward thinking, yet cautious. He is not easily misled by flash and marketing. He has a great ability to zero in on the important aspects of any technology. He looks at technology and asks, ’Will this help my company and is it really ready to be relied upon in a 24/7 corporate environment?’. Given this kind of decision making, I’m not surprised at all that he’s chosen Pervasive.SQL as McFarland Cascade’s database server platform of choice."

Richmond sums up the net result of their application development efforts by saying; "McFarland has more than tripled in gross revenue in the years we’ve been running on Data Access products. We see this growth well within reach for the foreseeable future. I rest well at night knowing that we have a reliable infrastructure in place to support management requirements."

Visit McFarland Cascade.

Read the details about Pervasive.SQL V8 for DataFlex.

Read more about the Visual DataFlex software solution from Data Access Worldwide.

Back