Financial Integration

Napier Brown is Europe's leading independent non-refining sugar distributor. They provide assured supply of a range of sugars, competitively priced and to specification, catering for all sectors of the food industry; retail, manufacturing and foodservice.  Napier Brown sources and handles sugar from all around the world, for receipt and redistribution.  Most importantly the company has the ability to guarantee security of supply, according to specification, especially in times of local shortfall, and has the flexibility to respond to market fluctuations.

Napier Brown awarded IMS a contract to install AFI in all of their sites. System 21 provides a complete integrated financial infrastructure for the business and enables faster and more effective decision making on complex issues with the most up to date and accurate data. Implementing System21 Financial Integrator was to enable the financial values associated with commercial activities to be directed to the required target accounts within the clients System 21 General Ledger. This solution would provide the flexibility to code and consolidate information within the General Ledger to give the relevant analysis for planning and control. The objective of the implementation was to establish a system that would automatically post System21 General Ledger (GL) transactions from sales order and stock movements based on an agreed set of rules.

The first stage was to agree with the finance team the requisite postings, in order to provide the analysis they required. This necessitated understanding the current movements used and the reasons for them. In light of these discussions, several changes were made to business processes to provide the analysis required. Once agreed, essential new System21 GL codes were created so that the AFI rules could be set up, and then IMS tested the process thoroughly to ensure it gave the necessary analysis. Topics like Goods Received Not Invoiced (GRNI) and Goods Despatched Not Invoiced (GDNI) were discussed in detail as they were not currently recorded and new procedures were agreed.

The main benefit to Napier Brown is that they have daily information available, previously these were only available monthly, and that the accounts takes 1.5 days less to collate which is a major benefit.  An additional benefit is that by dynamically linking stock to the General Ledger Napier Brown could ensuring the figure and analysis is always accurate. Download Case Study a PDF