OVET is a company in the south of the Netherlands specialized in the transshipment, storage and processing of bulk products, particularly in the field of solid fuels and ores. Its main clients are steel companies, power stations and traders. Ovet one most important of the stevedores of solid fuels for the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France.

Ovet manages their orders, service operations, time registration, logistics, financial transaction,.. using an ERP system (BaaN IV).  Disclosing this information to the field operators was done via downloads to MS Excel and paper printing.

Here the problem of disconnectivity between the field operators and the back office system became visible. Order status, time registration,… need to be filled in on paper or MS Excel and are to be sent to the administration office.  This leads to administrative overhead, communication overhead and data entry mistakes.

The vision of Ovet was to disclose the information from the back office system in Portals rather than the disconnected MS Excel spreadsheets. They have SharePoint as the platform for Enterprise Portals. With the Ometa Integrator solution they can now integrate the back office. The framework discloses information to non-ERP users and enables the link between the structured back office data and the unstructured front office (documents, mails, pictures,…).

 
Now operators see the ERP information and all related documents within their SharePoint Portal. New planned orders that are not yet stored in the back office system can be managed in SharePoint. Once all information is collected and the order is confirmed, it can be sent to the back office system.