By Paul Huijnen, Business Group Information Manager at Trouw Nutrition International

Autumn 2008

Ometa’s Integrator and Microsoft SharePoint Workflow enable Trouw Nutrition International to insert and update business data in Movex via a SharePoint Portal.

Trouw Nutrition International (TNI) is a division of Nutreco, an international animal nutrition and fish feed company. It has a workforce of 9,090 employees, located in approximately 100 production plants in 24 countries.

As globalisation requires common processes, all business units of TNI use a common Movex ERP system (on an AS400 platform) with common customer tables, product tables etc .

As the number of Movex users increased, data management and data quality became an issue. Manual procedures (via e-mail/fax/ phone) were put in place to ensure users did not modify data (e.g. customer credit limits) in the ERP system without authorised approval and communication to other groups.

There was an opportunity to optimize this process as it was very time consuming and open for mistakes.

New requirements related to segregation of duties (SOD) and audit trail resulted in a request to automate the process.

TNI decided to build a data-management portal in order to maintain all common ERP data worldwide. We had the following requirements:

  • It must be a generic platform
  • It must support SOD
  • It must have an audit trail of the changes to the data
  • It must support communication and approval with regard to creating, changing and deleting ERP data
  • It must be possible to report on bottlenecks
  • At field level it must be possible to define the authorized users for editing
  • At field level it must be possible to define the approvers
  • When multiple fields are changed on an existing record, it must result in parallel workflows
  • Inserts/updates can only be sent to Movex when all approvers accept the changed data.

 
Example: SharePoint handles the approvals & communication for updating and creating customers in Movex

 
  Example: SharePoint handles the approvals & communication for updating and creating customers in Movex

We already used Microsoft SharePoint as our collaboration platform. Now we also wanted to use this generic platform for the data management portal. A seamless integration between Movex and MS SharePoint was required. We turned to Ometa for help.  

Ometa implemented their MOVEX integration solution to disclose the ERP data within SharePoint. In the first phase it was possible to create new customer files or to update existing customer data from a SharePoint data management portal. Similar concepts are now implemented for product info, warehouse data etc.

Ometa also designed a new Workflow template with field based approvals, instead of the standard record based approval.

Examples:

·         Changing customer data will only result in approval notifications to the finance department when finance related fields of the customer, e.g. credit limits, are changed.

·         Parallel flows will start when multiple fields,  that require different approval groups, are changed

·         In case the person that updated the field/record and the approver are one and the same, a message is sent to the data manager to inform him on the violation of the Segregation of Duty. The data manager can start an audit based on this alert. 

After receiving all approvals, the update/creation is done automatically in Movex.

All requirements listed above were met.

The new workflow template built by Ometa is generic. It can be reused for any type of approval item (customer, article, warehouse information) when several groups work on the same data set but have different authorisation and approval rights.

  

Example of the approval flow when inserting/updating customer data

Nutreco Holding NV - Company Profile Snapshot (Source: Wright Investors' Service)

The Group's principal activities are producing food for farm animals such as poultry, pigs and ruminants, salmon and sea trout and production of broiler chickens. The Group operates in three segments: Animal Nutrition, Fish Feed, and Meat and Other Activities. On 31 December 2007, the Group had a workforce of 9,090 employees mainly located in approximately 100 production plants in 24 countries.