CS Holdings has successfully completed an ERP and MES implementation at Foskor Limited in Richards Bay, KwaZulu-Natal. The solution forms part of an application hosting partnership between the companies in which the JD Edwards ASP solution is run from a Hewlett-Packard data centre.
"Besides their use of a viable black economic empowerment model in implementing this solution for us, CS Holdings proved to have a good understanding of our business and were responsive to our needs," says Foskor president Yekani Tenza. "They proposed a cost-effective, integrated solution that could be implemented within Foskor`s tight time frames.
"This integrated solution brings benefits of reduced cost, reduced risk and improved efficiency and effectiveness to our whole group on a sustainable basis. While no implementation is without its challenges, we have found working with CS Holdings to be a positive experience. The first phase of the implementation went well and we are looking forward the second phase going live," he concludes.
Previously known as Indian Ocean Fertilizer, a wholly owned subsidiary of Foskor, IOF recently merged with Foskor in Phalaborwa to form Foskor Limited. Foskor Richards Bay is a key manufacturer of phosphoric acid for the export market, while Foskor Phalaborwa has as its core business the mining and processing of phosphate rock, the raw material used in the manufacture of phosphate fertilizer, animal feed supplements and industrial chemicals.
"The fact that Foskor were re-engineering their business vision following the merger of the two companies, necessitated a substantial change in their business processes," says CS Holdings business development manager Piero Grobler. "As both the Phalaborwa and Richards Bay sites are remotely situated, we found that the ASP model best suited their needs, and would mark the first step in establishing a world-class IT infrastructure.
"The Richards Bay site had been running a first-generation version of JD Edwards Financials for some time, but had outgrown the system," he continues. "Consequently, a new-generation, client-server version was re-implemented that included JDE Financials, Sales and Distribution, and Manufacturing modules.
"To enable Foskor to run an agile, market-driven mining and production environment, we implemented a system that integrates the JDE suite with the production management systems across the supply chain. This involved the development of an XML interface so that information is seamlessly feed from the shop floor through to the ASP-hosted ERP system."
The Johannesburg-based data centre was commissioned on 1 March and the system in Richards Bay went live on 1 April - on time and within budget. The second phase implementation at the group`s Phalaborwa operation is scheduled for completion by the end of August.
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