Automation

Perfecting the digital blend for Australia’s leading food & beverage manufacturer

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Automation

Perfecting the digital blend for Australia’s leading food & beverage manufacturer

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This Australian-owned, food and beverage manufacturer has been in operation for more than a century. The company has dedicated itself to being leading makers and innovators of great Australian food and drink brands.

Mission-driven and sustainability-focused, the manufacturer is the proud gatekeeper of many iconic Australian brands. Having a diverse portfolio of food & beverage brands under its arm, the Group wanted to have a holistic view of its supply chain and its suppliers from different parts of the world.

In a nutshell

  • Fortude supported the Australian food and beverage manufacturer to implement Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage by providing consulting resources for specific project assignments such as the supply chain module implementation, solution testing, key user support, data migration, solution rollout to additional business units, and providing application support via the managed service model.
  • By leveraging Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and establishing a Centre of Excellence (CoE) for RPA, the Group has been able to transform its finance function and reduce the cycle time on selected processes by 90%.
  • The Group has also implemented Fortest – an automated testing solution built for Infor M3 and CloudSuite. The solution has helped the manufacturer test all system upgrades and enhancements prior to go-live, reducing testing time by 90% and boosting accuracy of testing. This solution extends to Test Manager engagement that helps test governance and management for MCP and OS upgrades.

Poised for growth with Infor CloudSuite food & beverage

The food and beverage manufacturer had a vision to go global, and to do so it had to utilize technology and equip its resources to meet a global market. The Group wanted each segment of the business to be better informed about the entire operation so that its suppliers can be strategically employed and placed to meet the requirements of the Group’s expanding market.

The Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage solution is built for the food and beverage industry. The ERP operates across all segments of the business and helps the manufacturer introduce new products to the market faster while improving efficiencies across the board.

The solution enabled;

  • Forecasting and demand planning
  • Shelf-life and seasonality management
  • Advanced product lifecycle management
  • End-to-end product traceability
  • Networked business intelligence

Fortude supported the manufacturer’s Infor CloudSuite implementation by providing consulting resources or specific project assignments such as the supply chain module implementation, solution testing, key user support, data migration and solution rollout to additional business units, and application support via Fortude’s Infor Application Managed Services model.

Slicing inefficiencies with RPA

The Group’s finance team was using multiple applications for the same function resulting in a lack of integration. It also compelled the finance team to spend endless hours extracting data from disparate systems. This led to overall inefficiencies as the finance team had to engage in the manual extraction of information and preparation of reports.

With RPA technology, the manufacturer could look to partially or fully automate activities that are manual, or time-consuming. Following the identification of rules-based, repetitive areas that can be automated in the finance function including accounts receivable, accounts payable, costing, general ledger and reporting, and fixed assets; Fortude assigned a digital workforce to undertake a range of tasks within each of the areas to ensure that the finance function flows seamlessly.

RPA in the finance function enabled,

  • A boost in the accuracy rates of processing to 99%
  • The customer operates 24*7, whilst the bots work during holidays and early mornings
  • Time freed up for business users from repetitive work, resulting in happy people doing meaningful work.
  • Extraction of claim details from various PDF Claim Files with precision and accuracy
  • Ability to share reports with a set of recipients daily via email

Continuous system management

Having implemented a holistic Infor CloudSuite environment for the food and beverage manufacturer, the company also took a forward-looking approach by ensuring its systems are constantly updated
and issues that emerge are swiftly ironed out. The company decided to utilize Fortude’s Applications Managed Services to manage their Infor applications. The utilization of this service has helped the Group reduce IT operations costs and has taken the workload off their in-house team so that they no longer have to firefight issues that emerge within their Infor ecosystem.

Infor M3 managed services scope

Functional
Sales, Procurement, Warehouse, Finance, Manufacturing, Planning, Quality, Project
Management, M3 User Provisioning, On-call support for weekday critical issues

Satellite Products
Graphical Lot Tracker, Advanced Planner & Scheduler, Demand Planner, Factory Tracker,
Scheduling Workbench, Inventory Planning, Workbench, Fortest

Other
Manual Monitoring (Weekly MEC & ION Monitoring Report, Internal Daily Health
Check Notification), Retriggering Purchase Orders that have failed to be sent to GEP
(Production Transaction Waiver)

Tying the solutions together with Fortest

Fortest is a test automation framework developed using open-source tools for Infor M3 to make software test automation simple and easy. As the manufacturer is constantly updating its strategies to meet its growing clientele, they continously introduce upgrades to the system that need to be tested before going live. The introduction of upgrades tends to destabilize the existing system. While manual testing may cost less at the beginning, it can be time-consuming and over time will require a greater number of resources to sustain. However, with Fortest the company is able to free up resources and accelerate processes, while spending less on testing over time.

Fortest enabled,

  • Fast tracking of manual regression testing cycles, while cutting down the manual test duration up to 90%
  • Additional scale-up of tools depending on the client’s needs Infor M3 Specific Reusable Library, for faster implementation of tools
  • Industry-specific reusable script/ function library to build the end-to end workflows 
  • Continuous support and constant updates to the framework
  • Early visibility on test results
  • Increased testing accuracy
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