Computer World July 20, 1992

Cheerio to UNIX, cereal giant says 

by Hark Halper -- CW Staff

Minneapolis -- General Mills, Inc.'s distribution group has a true 
computer confession:  It tried Unix, but it did not inhale.

The $7.2 billion cereal giant's open system flirtation lasted all of a 
few months in early 1991, after the company installed a Hewlett-Packard 
Co. 9000 minicomputer running HP's Unix implementation, HP/UX, at its 
West Chicago, Ill., plant.

It did not take long for General Mills, based here, to return to its HP 
MPE senses, a recovery enabled in part by what the company discovered 
was the ease of portability between HP/UX and the proprietary MPE/IX 
operating system.

"There's a lot of panacea thought today that says you have to have 
Unix," said Mike Meinz, principal technical consultant in General Mills' 
IS group.  "You don't have to have Unix."

The company's Unix project was a pilot for what would have been a series 
of HP/UX installations running warehouse management software at nine 
General Mills distribution centers and eight plants around the country.

But the Unix euphoria, if it ever set in at all, never spread beyond 
West Chicago.  Within months, General Mills had pulled the plug on the 
9000 and ported the warehousing software over to the MPE/IX operating 
system running on a score of proprietary HP 3000 minicomputers.  MPE/IX 
is the latest release of HP's proprietary operating system.  It is 
compliant with the government's Posix open systems standard.

The move was logical because General Mills was already well-outfitted 
with HP 3000s.  It had 21 of them spread among its data center in 
Minneapolis and its plants and was about to begin the process of 
migrating them from HP's older versions to new models build on HP's 
Precision Architecture microprocessor.

This raises the question of why General Mills turned on to Unix and the 
9000 in the first place.

According to Meinz, the autonomous distributions division chose Unix 
because its preferred warehousing software -- an application provided by 
a small third-party vendor -- was available only for Unix platforms.

Good warehouse management software can provide a strategic advantage in 
the packaged food industry, where factors such as shelf life and 
inventory control affect a company's fortunes.  The distribution 
division wanted nothing less than what it considered the best software 
and was willing to change platforms to get it, Meinz noted.

Managers in the distribution operations farmed out maintenance of the 
program to the vendor but came to the sobering realization that, given 
General Mills' existing HP 3000 orientation, a 3000 implementation might 
be more prudent -- especially because, as Meinz noted, the folks in 
distribution "weren't happy with the [vendor's] bills."

The distribution group turned to the IS group to see what could be done 
internally.  IS' answer was to port the warehousing software to MPE/IX.

IN ONE-THIRD THE TIME

What followed became a testimonial to MPE's portability.  Meinz said he 
had anticipated the porting project would take six months, but it took 
only two.  And much of that time was spent developing enhancements to 
the existing program rather that actually porting to it.  General Mills 
had purchased the source code when it bought the software.

According to Meinz, the port was a cinch because the software vendor's 
program is based on Oracle Corp.'s database server software.  As such, 
it used many of the same building blocks in Oracles MPE port, like the C 
programming language and the SQL Forms development environment.

Meinz said the SQL Forms portion required no recompiling, and the C 
language portion required only a simple recompile process.