Background
Technip, engineering and construction specialists for the energy industry, work with subsea oil and gas clients. They focus on the manufacture and installation of flexible pipes, umbilicals and offshore platforms operating on five continents using a fleet of specialised vessels for pipeline installation and subsea construction.
One of the main manufacturing locations is in Le Trait, a large site near the port of Le Havre, important for access to the Channel, the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. This is the central location for the project that Technip has embarked on to re-structure their IT systems, before being rolled out to their sister manufacturing operations in Malaysia and the UK. Over time, their systems have grown to solve individual rather than collective group requirements, resulting in islands of information, long reporting timescales and inaccurate information for decision making. In order to address these issues Technip identified a need for an integrated system, the main aims being:
- To harmonise the manufacturing processes and standardise the data.
- To improve the performance of all resources.
- To facilitate exchange of information and links between functional domains.
- To apply best practices in the installation of the ERP system, IFS.
Technip approached Anthesis to supply a consultant experienced in both a range of technical skills and the IFS package as part of the project. There were a number of areas where Technip needed assistance. Anthesis was able to appoint one of their senior consultants, Colin Hobley, to the project. Hebrough his skills to bear in the five separate areas identified below.
Interfaces
- Design and development of an interface between IFS and a corporate data management system to unify Suppliers, Customers and Projects, group-wide. BizTalk was used as the intermediary.
- Design, specification and development of the GL posting routines for a highly customised IFS development to capture price sheet details for manufacturing Projects.
- Design and development of an interface that passes data to and takes data from a dot net web application, for the purpose of cross charging project activities between departments. Upon acceptance of the charges the interface then posted to the relevant GL vouchers in IFS.
- Design, specification and development of the disparate electronic files and documents (reports and remittances) required by France, Malaysia and the UK for Supplier payments. The same was also carried out for employee expenses in France.
- Design and development of methods to verify, report and control IFS time recording with an inhouse developed T&A system.
- Design, specification and development of an interface between IFS and a bespoke quality management system. This was accomplished using BizTalk as the medium.
Data Migration
Colin worked with Cap Gemini to provide the expertise on IFS data migration on a number of separate projects. This included the sequence of data mapping, translation, extraction from legacy systems, provision to business users for the verification stage and them population of data back into IFS.
Report writing
By working with PL/SQL development tools, Colin was able to create expediting emails in the area of procurement authorisation, time reporting and invoice follow up, amongst others.
Monitoring tools
Skilled in Crystal Reports and SQL, Colin was able to work with the process owners to translate their requirements over standard and customised IFS into specifications that he could then create reports from.
System Improvement
Colin was responsible for monitoring and improving the performance of the IFS system. By working with the project team to understand the business processes, he was able to optimise application layer performance in areas such as monitoring of IFS connectivity logs and using the event handler to tune IFS business logic to better meet the business needs.
Colin is a skilled IFS technical consultant who is as comfortable discussing requirements with users and working these into a specification as he is at creating a technical solution. Technip appointed him as their main contact with Gap Gemini on the data migration sub-project due to his skill at building and maintaining relationships. Colin’s technical skills encompass a wide range of areas and it was this breadth of knowledge, combined with industry-wide experience of IFS business processes and his approachable nature that made him a good fit for the role at Technip. Due to this positive experience, Technip and Anthesis plan to work together on further projects as they continue to roll out IFS S.
