Challenge
With the company since 2015, Zohair was aware of Bioquell’s long history with Exel, and the evolution of Exel’s system footprint within the business over that time.
In particular, he explains, he was keen to eliminate some of the customisation that had taken place within the previous version, and return Bioquell to the standard EFACS solution.
Another goal, he adds, was to move away from stand-alone third-party shopfloor data collection, and embrace the newly-updated shopfloor data collection functionality in EFACS. Finally, the plan was to also take advantage of the additional reporting functionality offered by EFACS E/8 version 8.6.1, which
would help to eliminate a series of ‘bolt on’ spreadsheets that had been developed.
“With everything carried out within EFACS, we’d be seeing a ‘single version of the truth’, thereby eliminating debates about which system had the right data,” he notes.
In striving for this goal, Bioquell was consciously mirroring an earlier enterprise software decision taken within the business back in 2010, when it had elected to abandon a previously-implemented field service management system and adopt Exel’s competing Field Service offering instead.
It had made sense for as much as possible to take place under the Exel umbrella, taking advantage of the complete integration inherent in EFACS E/8, and the efficiencies achieved by avoiding double data-entry and ‘data creep’ between systems.
“What that has given us is a centralised system for both manufacturing and field service: everything that we need is there in one seamless system, stretching all the way from the sales function to the service function,” says Zohair.
And now, with the decision to migrate to the latest, newest version of EFACS E/8, Bioquell could exploit not only the new version’s upgraded shopfloor data capture capabilities, but also its powerfully-enhanced reporting and business intelligence capabilities – Microsoft’s Power BI, and BIRT-based real-time dashboards and business intelligence.