Visy Industries was established in Melbourne in 1948 and has since grown to become one of the world’s largest privately owned paper, packaging and recycling companies. With over 7,000 employees, Visy Industries operates in more than 120 sites throughout Australasia and has trading offices across Asia and Europe.
Visy provides end-to-end solutions across paper, primary packaging, fibre packaging, packaging supplies and consumables, point of sale displays, automation, materials handling, logistics and resource recovery.
A flexible data automation tool
Over the last decade, Visy Industries has embraced data automation to improve the efficiency of moving master data into and out of its SAP system.
To create data management efficiencies, for a number of years Visy have leveraged a data automation tool called Winshuttle, provided by DXC Technology. The manufacturer has continued to expand its Winshuttle footprint enterprise-wide, adding more licences and growing its use within the organisation.
“Once we became familiar with its capabilities, we saw the opportunity to use it across other processes and open it up to business users,” says Andrew Tribe, Visy’s SAP Partner Manager. “We began by using it in our recycling business to undertake mass updates of schedule agreements, sales orders and material master data. We then saw opportunities within the asset management space so we acquired additional licences for our corporate asset administrator to use.”
"We were able to use Winshuttle to import the master data into our system, and I estimate it took us half the amount of time it would have taken using traditional importing tools”
Andrew Tribe SAP Partner Manager, Visy Industries
Accelerated data transfer for acquisition
When Visy were met with the challenge of loading data from a newly acquired business — that had over 75,000 different material master codes, several thousand customers, and as many vendors — Winshuttle supported by DXC was the proven choice.
The data transfer had to be completed within a short period. According to Visy’s Tribe, Winshuttle played a critical role in the successful transition.
“We didn’t have the time to extract the data from the purchased company in a format that made it easy for us to upload. It was in a very raw form. We were able to use Winshuttle to import the master data into our system, and I estimate it took us half the amount of time it would have taken using traditional importing tools,” he says.
Business-wide efficiencies
DXC designed an implementation and training strategy to help Visy’s IT department implement Winshuttle. A key aim was to accelerate adoption of the templates and to get Visy staff up to speed on best practice. After realising the benefits, Visy expanded user adoption by adding more licences.
Tribe says Winshuttle is less complicated to use than traditional SAP tools, which can be expensive and difficult to maintain. “It takes time to write a script or develop one using SAP’s Batch Communication Data techniques. We wanted to be nimbler in terms of our data governance, and Winshuttle templates have proven to be very efficient.”
Winshuttle simplifies the upload of every type of master data — material, customer, and vendor data — as well as transactional data. “Winshuttle does everything automatically,” says Tribe. “You can use it for establishing and changing master data, for updating transactions and operational transactions as well. It reduces the number of manual keystrokes significantly.”
“It is an intuitive product, so people pick it up quickly. Winshuttle has a good knowledge-base of articles, and business users can record a script, map it and create a template to get their data loading done without needing external support.”
Andrew Tribe SAP Partner Manager, Visy Industries
Less time, fewer errors
That is where the real benefits of using Winshuttle rest, says Tribe. Automating input removes the need for time-consuming manual data entry, allowing organisations to move data en masse quickly.
“Once you have identified high volume repeatable transactions, you can create a Winshuttle template very easily and put it to work. It reduces time and effort markedly.”
Winshuttle cuts down on mistakes as well, according to Tribe. “Winshuttle scripts have defaults built into them that ensure fields are not missed when data is entered into them. So it is not just about efficiency; it is also about error reduction.”
He says business users transition to Winshuttle without much effort. “It is an intuitive product, so people pick it up quickly. Winshuttle has a good knowledge base of articles, and business users can record a script, map it and create a template to get their data loading done without needing external support.”
Winshuttle is also tightly integrated into Microsoft Excel. “Business users appreciate that,” says Tribe. “They can use the rich functionality of Excel to filter and sort data before loading. If the load doesn’t run as expected, it is easy to reprocess data. And you always have a backup available, so if something does go wrong, you can revert and reload it again. You can also have multiple loads coinciding.”
The digital advantage
The downstream benefits of more effective and efficient data loading are valuable to the organisation as a whole, not just the business user. Freeing up human resources through data automation allows people to be assigned to higher-value tasks. “Moving people away from non-value-add activity to value-add activities is what digitisation is all about,” says Tribe.
Winshuttle helps solve problems that arise with decentralised data input — a process that can be fraught when different people input data in slightly different ways, leading to data inconsistencies.
“If data is entered and maintained correctly — which it is when you use Winshuttle’s templated approach — the quality of the reporting that you can get out of the system is improved,” says Tribe.
If you get the master data inputted correctly at the start — the business processes tend to be vastly improved across all steps. “If data is difficult to input, then a user may simply decide not to enter it. That might be okay for their needs, but the next person in the chain who needs that data then has to do something manually to compensate for that lack of data. So, it has a detrimental snowball effect.”
Stress tested
Deploying Winshuttle during a recent corporate acquisition proved very beneficial, says Tribe: “We used it to load the vast majority of the data. We got the company off its platform and onto ours in double quick time by creating Winshuttle templates for each of the data objects. We loaded the data from spreadsheets into those objects, processed them and dealt with any errors as part of the load process. We used the same templates in six different data loads.”
“We wouldn’t have achieved that in the timeframe we did using traditional tools, without pumping in extra resources. As it was, we could just tell people to fill in data according to the template and we knew everything would be consistent.” Tribe says Visy Industries always strives to be agile and responsive, and “Winshuttle helps us pursue that goal. It allows us to self-manage. Our users don’t need much support because the application is intuitive and easy to use.”