Van Hessen Saves Valuable IT Resources with Hubble and CXO

In Brief

• Liberated 10% of IT team’s resources
• Hubble works seamlessly with Van Hessen’s J.D. Edwards ERP environment
• Empowered the finance team to generate and edit their own reports

Founded in 1902, Van Hessen has evolved into one of the world’s leading companies in the harvesting, processing, and distribution of natural casings and meat products. The business works closely with a huge array of worldwide slaughterhouses to secure a constant flow of raw materials to the meat industry.

Maintaining offices and factories in over 26 countries, Van Hessen closely controls and monitors its supply chain to guarantee quality products. The Van Hessen group consistently innovates and explores new ways to maximize production efficiency for customers across the globe.

Meeting Stringent Local and Worldwide Regulations

When Wouter van Beek joined Van Hessen as IT director in December 2000, the company operated on a small, multinational scale with an IT department of three employees. In the two decades since then the business has grown exponentially.

In 2017, Van Hessen merged with the Saria Group. Together, the two businesses integrated the natural casings activities of Teeuwissen, a subsidiary of the Saria Group, and Van Hessen into a new division under the name of Van Hessen. Combined, they spearheaded a fully integrated worldwide value chain that safeguarded continuity and leadership in quality.

The IT department gradually extended to a team of 30 tasked with creating and distributing critical ad hoc reports to stakeholders across the entire global business. As the company grew, the finance department remained heavily dependent on IT to create custom queries and modify reports. Facing a growing workload, reporting duties quickly became overwhelming. Up to 10% of the IT team’s resources were dedicated to finance and accounting queries.

“20 years ago, we started as a family company, then we grew and grew and grew until we were bought by a very big company that already had a division on casings,” said van Beek. “Because of the company’s sudden growth, we had demands that we couldn’t fulfill.”

The company was already doing business worldwide and van Beek’s IT department saw a 200% increase in overall workload. Additionally, laws surrounding the quality and handling of food are complicated at a global scale, especially considering local regulations, and fulfilling consumer demand for safe, high-quality products.

“From a legal standpoint, you need to maintain transparency in the meat industry,” van Beek said. “You need to track and trace back to where you got your supplies in the case of situations like recalls.”

Working Seamlessly with J.D. Edwards

van Beek began searching for a solution that worked for his IT team while continuing to satisfy worldwide governance and regulatory requirements. Ultimately, his goal was to create a self-service portal to empower the finance department to create and edit its own reports. The business used J.D. Edwards as its ERP and required a tool that would work seamlessly with its existing software, fulfilling business needs such as:

• Providing self-service reporting for finance teams
• Working seamlessly with J.D. Edwards
• Having easy-to-use functionality
• Simplifying regulatory requirements around the world

Ultimately, the tools that provided the best fit were Hubble and CXO by insightsoftware. Hubble met van Hessen’s specific business needs by providing easy reporting that worked hand-in-hand with the company’s J.D. Edwards environment while CXO offered advanced figure analysis.

“We needed tools that were easily configurable around J.D. Edwards so we didn’t have to train everybody on data structures,” said van Beek. “We looked for one that already had everything we needed built in. There aren’t many tools which supply that. insightsoftware was the only one that could.”

Implementation and Training

From installation to training, implementation was a breeze for Van Hessen. The business reached out to insightsoftware during the summer of 2020 and decided to place the final order in October of the same year. Once installed, the company dedicated two weeks to training and shortly after, finance teams were already generating their own reports.

“If you understand J.D. Edwards, you can easily understand Hubble,” van Beek explained. “It’s something that we want because we don’t have the time or the people to spend a lot of resources in training.”

Results

CXO and Hubble helped Van Hessen to strengthen its finance department while drastically reducing IT’s workload. Here’s how:

• CXO provided live figure analysis while incorporating non-EPM data together with financial figures and providing high quality visualizations.
• Hubble alleviated demand on IT by enabling Van Hessen’s finance teams to run and edit their own reports.

Relieving Strain on IT

Van Hessen chose CXO and Hubble to meet its unique business needs while alleviating heavy IT workloads. “Before adopting insightsoftware, our IT department couldn’t manage financial reporting for everybody by month-end close,” said van Beek. “There wasn’t an option to do nothing about it. We needed to create an option for self-service. It was the only way for us to be able to manage this without having an IT team of 60-70 people.”

Reporting with Ease

Before adopting insightsoftware systems, the IT department at Van Hessen struggled to meet demand for creating ad hoc reports. Now, finance teams are equipped with a simple way to meet reporting deadlines more easily in an environment they already understand.

“If you know J.D. Edwards, it’s easy to use Hubble,” said van Beek. “There are a lot of predefined reports and ad hoc queries that you can use to create reports. Even if you don’t know anything about the data structures of J.D. Edwards and how things are connected, you can still use these products to create all the custom reports you need.”

Supporting a Worldwide Company

When the business began, Van Hessen started with a single instance of J.D. Edwards. Now, it supports 60-70 companies all operating in J.D. Edwards with 30 instances of the ERP globally. Demand continues to grow, along with ad hoc queries and reports that must be completed by month-end close.

Since Van Hessen implemented insightsoftware, each location is able to create and maintain the reports it needs to survive and thrive. Staff quickly gained a deep understanding of Hubble because they operate in much the same way as the existing J.D. Edwards systems. Both large and small branches have the tools they need to fully manage finance departments and reporting without relying on IT.