Overview

ENRC, a FTSE 100 company, is one of the leading diversified natural resources groups with integrated mining, processing, energy, logistical and marketing operations. They operate in Kazakhstan, China, Russia, Brazil and Africa (the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Mozambique and South Africa).

ENRC Africa, were looking for a solution which could streamline complex business processes. The solution needed to integrate with their ERP solution, Accpac/Sage 300 ERP, and be able to process a high volume of transactions across multiple companies.

Alltek

As South African distributors of IMan, Alltek were engaged by ENRC Africa to meet their system integration requirements between disparate systems and also to automate some of the ACCPAC business processes via complex workflow automation.

Requirements

• Automation of complex intercompany processes and transactions.
• Business alerting and insight, to help identify discrepancy issues between the companies.
• Automation of data imports into ENRC’s supply chain company, Sabot Procurement.

Solution

IMan was able to automate complex intercompany procurement processes for several of ENRC’s mines including:

• Creation of Purchase Receipts, Invoices & Credit/Debit Notes, Sales Shipments & Invoices transactions within Sage300 ERP across various companies.
• Incorporation of business logic for under and over receipting.
• Advanced error logging, handling, & alerting staff to exceptional transactions.
• Generation of import duty invoices for Democratic Republic of Congo purchases.
• Specialised handling of and accounting for complex tax calculations.

Alert staff throughout the group to exceptional data, providing ENRC with insight to inefficient internal processes. Armed with this information ENRC staff can now take remedial action to erroneous transactions, thus making staff more accountable, including:

• Ensuring there are no discrepancies with back to back orders, ie Sales Orders to Purchase Orders.
• Notification of value & quantity differences in intercompany shipments & receipts.
• Informing the relevant staff of erroneous and unmatched transactions.
• Triggering of invoice printing in external workflow solution.

Automation of a number of processes within ENRCs internal procurement company, Sabot:

• Import of offline spreadsheets of monthly sales orders into Sage300 ERP.
• Import of all shipments for South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia & the Democratic Republic of Congo into Sage300 ERP as sales orders.
• Automation of the back-to-back ordering process, where sales orders would be generated from the corresponding Purchase Orders.

Project Challenges

Due to ENRC’s dynamic business model and quest for efficiency, each integration went through several iterations and changes. IMan was able to effortlessly adapt to these changes and accommodate ENRC’s requirements with ease, providing a highly configurable and flexible solution.

Outcome

IMan provided a cost-effective, highly configurable & flexible solution, where ENRC were able to further fine tune their processes, providing transparency to their operation and in depth monitoring. Alltek’s in-depth of knowledge & the ease in which IMan has adapted to the ever changing environment. ENRC are impressed thus far, in that they have a solution that:

• Encourages process refinement and business efficiency.
• Has resulted in providing transparency into their day to day running of the business.
• Has a wide scope with a number of projects planned in the future, including integration with external fleet management solution.