Kara Cummings

From its humble beginnings in a garage in Lithonia, Georgia, Acuity Brands, Inc. has risen to become North America's largest manufacturer of lighting equipment for commercial, industrial, outdoor, and residential applications. The company operates 22 manufacturing plants in North America, with major markets in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. In an industry ruled by demands for competitive pricing and rapid delivery, Acuity must keep unit costs low and deliver complex manufacturing orders at high speed. The company's wide spectrum of products are produced at an assembly volume that averages 400,000 manufacturing builds, and adds approximately 1,000 built materials a week. Acuity credits its early adoption of technology for its success at simplifying complex distribution processes. It was the first in the lighting industry to use client server computing to connect its sales agents to the parent company--one of the factors that changed the industry model from regional to national distribution for lighting manufacturers.

This technology savvy company realized in the late 1990s that growth had pushed the limits of its transaction environment to the point where it could not keep up with the manufacturing cycles. Acuity solved this by updating its systems with components of the Oracle E-Business Suite. Meanwhile, growth of its product databases and number of applications users had created scalability issues with the company's Windows NT environment. Acuity needed a more flexible solution for running its applications in order to stay ahead of the competition. With its new Oracle platform up and running, Acuity has the high levels of availability needed for critical applications. If one server in the cluster of four fails or needs to be taken out of service for maintenance, the other three servers will automatically take over. Capacity can be increased by adding processors to the existing Dell servers, or the company can scale out horizontally with relative ease by adding additional servers to the cluster. "One of the advantages of the clustered configuration is the ability to scale horizontally. This offers us added flexibility in our IT environments, which is an important part of our overall strategy." Says Jeff Kernan, Executive Vice President and Chief Supply Chain Officer of Acuity Lighting Group, Acuity's parent. "And by going with Oracle on Linux, we saved significantly by avoiding the costs of having to buy a big UNIX processor, pay UNIX licensing fees, and hire staff with UNIX expertise."