Ballast Nedam
How AFAS was successfully connected to the data management system.
“The interfaces save a tremendous amount of work”
The Van Nelle Factory, the Oosterscheldekering and the Johan Cruijff Arena. With more than 140 years of experience, Ballast Nedam has worked on impressive projects. The secret behind this success? A flexible and solution-oriented way of working. And this approach is reflected in the construction company’s IT policy.
Ballast Nedam is very much a Microsoft company, says Jan Paul Seijlhouwer, Senior Project Manager ICT. When AFAS was chosen for the payroll administration in 2020, it had to be compatible with the primary data management system in Microsoft Dynamics.
With a few thousand employees, there were large amounts of data to be exchanged between the systems. The team therefore went in search of an AFAS partner to create integrations. On the recommendation of AFAS, the construction company ended up at Salure. After a few positive conversations, the choice was quickly made.
Project photo Blankenburg connection:
Rijkswaterstaat/Danny Cornelissen
Ballast Nedam about Salure
‘At the beginning of this year, we started the definition phase for the links. In this phase, we determined exactly how we wanted everything. We first did this by means of manual exports from AFAS to Excel, and then we imported this data into AX. Then we set up the links so that this happens automatically. That really saves a lot of time.'”
Jan Paul Seijlhouwer, senior manager IT at Ballast Nedam
Progressing smarter with Salure
Since going live in January, Ballast Nedam has been working with the links in SalureConnect. The link for the journal entry was added in March. Salure supports Ballast Nedam with links for, among other things:
- Exporting journal entries from AFAS Profit on a monthly basis;
- The daily synchronization of personnel data between AFAS Profit and the Master Data Management system;
- The automatic exchange of supplier data between Profit and AX.
An example: “In the Master Data Management system, we keep track of when a person’s e-mail address is converted from private to business, plus the corresponding information for the automatic login. If an applicant enters via OutSite with his/her private address, this must be converted to a business address when he/she starts working. This is then done in our Master Data Management system. This information is exchanged between the systems via a two-way link.
Result
“In terms of technology, this link is running very nicely,” says Jan Paul, “it may not seem like much, but it saves a huge amount of work that you no longer have to do yourself.”
By now, the links are running well and Jan Paul is looking forward to further cooperation with Salure: “It may well be that a number of links will be added in the future. For example, when we want to transfer second employment files. We also want to make an XML export of the journal entries instead of an Excel export. This would then be loaded directly into the primary financial system. Those are great projects to get started on.”
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