Project photo above: Blankenburg connection, Rijkswaterstaat/Danny Cornelissen
How AFAS was successfully connected to the data management system.
"The links 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 ICT policy.
Ballast Nedam is a Microsoft house, explains Jan Paul Seijlhouwer, Senior Project Manager ICT. So when AFAS was chosen in 2020 for the payroll administration, it had to fit well with the primary data management system in Microsoft Dynamics.
With several thousand employees, there were large amounts of data to be exchanged between systems. The team therefore started looking for an AFAS partner to create links. On the recommendation of AFAS, the construction company ended up with Salure. After a few positive conversations, the choice was quickly made.
Smart forward together with Salure
Since going live in January, Ballast Nedam has been working with the links in SalureConnect, to which the journal entry link was added in March. Thus Salure supports Ballast Nedam with links for, among other things:
- Monthly export of journal entries from AFAS Profit;
- Daily synchronization of personnel data between AFAS Profit and the Master Data Management system;
- 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 automatic login. If a job applicant comes in through OutSite with his private address, it must be converted to a business address when he is hired. 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, it runs very nicely with this coupling,” Jan Paul says, “it may not seem like much, but it saves a tremendous amount of work that you no longer have to do yourself.”
Meanwhile, 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 create an XML export of the journal entries instead of an Excel export. This is then loaded directly into the primary financial system. Those are great projects to get started on.”
''Early this year, we started the definition phase for the links. In this phase, we determined exactly how we wanted everything. We first did this through manual exports from AFAS to Excel, and then we imported this data into AX. Then we set up the links so that this goes automatically. That really saves a lot of time.'
Jan Paul Seijlhouwer
senior manager of ICT at Ballast Nedam
