Ensign-Bickford Industries Inc.
An international science and technology conglomerate leveraged the Boomi Enterprise Platform to manage rapid growth, connect, automate and support global sites, critical business processes, and operations.
Business goals
Ensign-Bickford Industries (EBI) has diversified its market presence since 1836, expanding into aerospace, defense, pet food, and agricultural science. To manage unprecedented growth, EBI had to improve its enterprise-level system integrations, especially with its IFS ERP platform.
The organization’s goal was to reduce costs, boost productivity, improve work-life balance, and enhance customer experience through various projects. These included automating payroll, integrating IFS to support shop floor operations, creating a data pipeline, and streamlining SAP Concur travel and expense data.
Integration Challenges
To achieve its integration and automation goals, Ensign-Bickford needed to overcome technology challenges such as merging Concur T&E data with IFS.
Existing legacy processes involved monthly data loading, which wasn’t sufficient for business units needing real-time financial insights. EBI wanted the data available on a daily basis so that business units could track financial activity throughout the month. Manually updating data daily would be time-consuming and error-prone, requiring over 100 hours of work annually.
How Boomi Helped
The EBI Global Applications Team chose the Boomi Enterprise Platform in 2021 to simplify processes. Boomi’s IFS-Boomi connector, which works with IFS REST APIs, was a deciding factor.
EBI Data and Analytics Manager Christopher Briglia collaborated with Boomi to identify the right IFS APIs for automating external voucher creation. This enables Boomi to retrieve daily T&E data from SAP Concur and load it into IFS, streamlining the process for other business units to load various data types.
Results
With Boomi, EBI achieved significant benefits, including cost savings, productivity enhancements, improved work-life balance, and higher customer satisfaction. For instance, the Boomi-Concur T&E integration eliminated 75 percent of potential failure points, reducing time spent on troubleshooting.
The integration minimized manual work by 95% and eliminated 100% of manual effort required before T&E data is loaded in IFS. The hours needed from finance and human resources for Workday to ADP payroll integration also greatly reduced, and minimized error potential.
