Over the past quarter, there have been several updates from the BA team contributing to the smooth running of our business.
In collaboration with many CDx departments, Business Applications (BA), Finance, and Customer Service went live with the migration of Technopath USA onto the CDx Salesforce system and SAP ECC system on April 1. Within Salesforce, they implemented single sign-on (SSO) to make signing in a one-click event.
For Fiscal Year 2023, the BA team will be focused on several important projects. They will be giving heightened focus to improving security, avoiding the technical obsolescence of key systems, and improving Sarbanes Oxley IT Controls (SOX).
Working with multiple departments across LGC Group, the BA team will continue to improve SOX Controls for SAP ECC. Of note are two key controls. The first is about reviewing all SAP users’ access to make sure their access is appropriate for their job. The second is about reviewing each user’s access to make sure there are no segregation of duties (SoD) issues—for example, an employee who can both create a vendor in SAP and pay the vendor. This situation would raise audit concerns and would need to be resolved.
To support a key customer requirement for TCD USA customers, Lloyd Stahlbush, Nancy Merriman, Paul Loranger, and others are searching for a solution for SAP ECC that allows TCD USA customers to reserve a predetermined quantity of a specific product\batch combination as their own “virtual” inventory to be drawn down with their future orders. This process is referred to as Product Sequestering. The team is continuing to assess possible solutions.
Aligning to the theme of avoiding technical obsolescence, Jeff Girouard and Cathy Sentner will be doing a technical upgrade of Salesforce from the Classic backend and user-interface to the Lightning backend and user-interface. Classic is now obsolete, with Salesforce no longer investing in it, while Lightning is easier to use and will be the subject of future enhancements by Salesforce. The project is ramping up now.
Another project along the lines of obsolescence and to support CDx growth is an in-flight project to migrate from Sisense to Tableau by November 2022. Tableau is a Group standard reporting platform that is scalable and fully supported. Olivia Davis is leading this effort. She will be working with the Group Business Intelligence team and various CDx businesspeople to convert 88 Sisense reports to Tableau.
For Operations, Nimisha Nigam will be pursuing a solution that will calculate an estimated freight charge for SAP ECC orders, based box dimensions, weight, packing material, refrigerants, and other criteria. If Greg Parenteau’s Logistics team ships the order with the recommended packing configuration, the estimated freight and invoiced freight should match. In the future, this solution will be added to CDx Salesforce quotes and to the future SAP eCommerce system’s shopping basket.
Finally, from Traverse City, API merged their instance of Microsoft 365 with the LGC instance on March 14, making internal communication with other sites easier and providing better access to LGC resources on Teams and MyLGC. Emails will still come from “api-pt.com."