Case Study/ Produce Manufacturer

Produce Manufacturer

Getting Audits on Track for a Complex, Multi-National Company

The Challenge

If you’ve ever bought fresh strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, or raspberries from the supermarket, it’s very likely the brand you bought was our customer’s. This customer is the global market leader in this market and is rapidly growing, bringing in $4 billion in revenue every year.

With 86 entities, including a research arm and multiple entities in Europe, the U.S., Mexico, and Chile—each with unique processes—the company is complex. They moved European operations to Microsoft Dynamics AX on-premises in 2015, with the Americas following in 2016, but it wasn’t long before their Manager of Master Data, and his staff of three, found themselves in a constant cycle of adding new users as well as dealing with the complexities associated with the company’s structure.

While Dynamics AX was working fine as an ERP system, problems arose when it came time for the upcoming audit. Auditors pointed out several issues:

- There was no way for the company to provide auditors with the information they needed

- Separation of Duties (SoD) were handled manually and therefore were not being sufficiently enforced

- There were several weak or undefined processes, and with the many entities, there were security risks around how the users were being managed

It was time to bring in a tool that could help.

“Fastpath makes it simple...and the auditors understand it.”

Manager of Master Data , Produce Manufacturer

The solution

This client chose Fastpath to help manage user security and SoD issues and get a handle on audits.

Fastpath is a comprehensive, cloud-based orchestration platform that enables companies to identify security conflicts within their ERP application, better understand their overall security, and provide the necessary documentation to both internal and external auditors. The implementation of the on-premises version of Fastpath was completed without a hitch, and the Manager of Master Data and his team were able to start improving roles during that implementation. From there, they’ve been able to focus on streamlining reports and validating roles.

The results

Since implementing Fastpath, the data team has already seen a drastic difference: “Fastpath makes it simple,” he explained. “The auditors understand it. They make selections, and we show them our reports or whatever they need to see. It’s a very simple process…totally different from what it was before, which took forever. We’ve saved a lot of time. It’s just a check-off item now.”

Separation of duties is also much easier. With the customer’s 86 entities, when someone has rights in one entity, and they need access to another entity, it would have been nearly impossible to figure out potential conflicts across entities. With Fastpath, this is no longer a concern.

Security and adding new users, before Fastpath was an inefficient process that brought risk along with it. With Fastpath, even with a lean staff of three, users are added in minutes, and security is handled completely within Fastpath.

This customer has been so happy with the on-premises version that they are now in the process of moving from Dynamics AX on-premises to AX in the cloud (beginning with the U.S.), and Fastpath will move to the cloud with them.

The customer is already excited about what the cloud is able to offer: “Modifications we request—for example, we use entity IDs versus entity names because of having so many entities—are addressed so fast. We made that request a couple of months ago, and it’s already in the current version. Another request we made took only two weeks.” He is also very happy with getting user approvals exponentially faster. An approval that would have taken days to obtain in the past can now be done on a mobile phone, via the web—with no delays, even dealing with different time zones. The next step is to move the remaining entities to the cloud, which will integrate with other business-critical applications like NetSuite and ServiceNow.

So, how was working with Fastpath?

“Really great,” said the customer. “The service level is extremely high, and the online help in the cloud is fantastic. It’s rare to work with a vendor that we don’t have any issues with. Working with Fastpath has exceeded all the experience with all the other vendors I’ve dealt with.”