Chr. Hansen

For a worldwide corporation with two-digit growth rates and 2,500 employees in more than 30 countries around the globe, it is all about efficiency and process optimization.

And if, on top of that, you can have your wishes fulfilled by way of a future oriented solution, which according to Chr. Hansen's IT systems specialist Henrik Behrndt has intuitive user interfaces which are simply so outstanding that the majority of users will hardly have to take any training, the objective seems to be within the reach of an arm.

Chr. Hansen is today one of Denmark's leading flag ships within development of natural ingredient solutions such as cultures, enzymes, colourings and flavourings to the food industry, the agricultural sector, and the pharmaceutical industry.

The clients are manifold and may most quickly be described as all people throughout the world who eat industrialized food. Close to half a billion people eat products from Chr. Hansen on a daily basis. Not many of them, however, are familiar with the company behind the products. Chr. Hansen is a highly complex business in a highly competitive market in which the internal focus more than anything else is on controlling documentation.

Need for an intelligent solution

Employees of Chr. Hansen use different kinds of documentation. Documentation is used by chemists, when researching and working on a new product, so as to obtain concise knowledge about how the old one performs. It is also used by production staff to spot and follow-up on trends which would otherwise have remained hidden, by sales people on the many different corporate sites, demanding easy and quick access, by the marketing department to draw relevant reports. And - last, but certainly not least, documentation used by management to drive the overall business strategy for further growth. In conclusion: Already years ago, Chr. Hansen needed an intelligent solution for intelligent handling of mission critical data.

First, there was darkness
The situation before the introduction of the solutions from Affecto is readily characterized by a smiling Henrik Behrndt as fragmented and somewhat chaotic. The technical solutions are based on the products of Business Objects.

- It was more than difficult. It took long drives to our production unit in Roskilde where I had to pull binders down from the shelves to find all necessary information. It was Excel spread sheets and manual data withdrawals with immensely complicated structures. It was - in short - completely different from our situation today where we are able to pull all data directly from the system and obtain both clear insight as well as an instant, unambiguous overview of our business.

- In 2000, the intelligent solutions from Affecto were chosen as a strategic reporting tool at Chr. Hansen in order to handle all purely technical data from our culture production - the very core of our business. The prerequisite was that we wanted the outstanding, future centric solution, which would work impeccably - in both short and long term. In a business such as ours, documentation - and the easy and swift access to it - is absolute key. It is business critical. And it is something that should absolutely work without failure every single day, because if it does not - our shop stops, so to speak, sounds the forthright statement.

Then we found the right switch
- We use the solutions as a reporting tool for both internal users and external customers. The outcome is that not only do we provide access to our technical data. We also, in fact, ensure the possibility of statistic analysis for our users, so that they are able to view data across various sources and have production, quality assurance and business related information from our SAP system at their disposal in just one single context, Henrik Behrndt explains.

- And that is actually the best and most simple way of explaining the reasons for our usage of the solutions from Affecto: They give us exactly the overall cockpit from which we can access data - independently of sources.

- They are solutions and tools which allow us to observe things within production and quality which we otherwise would not have noticed. They are the inbuilt ability to do consequential calculations as regards the actual situation as opposed to the optimal situation. And they are the analytical tools to localize problems and find solutions. They are indicators of how we should realign a process to drive our ongoing business longterm, and how we should streamline our product flow throughout the organization. They provide a short and very solid overview as well as profound insight in a visually accessible and very user friendly manner.

And then, there was light

Henrik Behrndt tells that the user reactions have been positive from day one in 2000. Everyone - and Chr. Hansen has close to 300 named users today, which primarily work within production and quality assurance, while marketing and sales also to a certain extent use the systems towards external customers - has really been able to use the tools in their daily work where access to production journals, batch reports,analysis certificates and production specifications are mission critical.

He continues: - It has been decided to be upgraded to a web interface solution, because we are a global organization with a number of culture units spread around the globe. With our web interface, it is irrelevant if we access the solutions from our culture production sites in Roskilde and

Avedoere or from our units in Paris, France, or north of Frankfurt in Germany or whether it actually happens as far away as from our two units north of Chicago in the USA. We all have the same authorizations.

- The project and the solutions have more than lived up to our expectations. They have given us clear business advantages in terms of access to data otherwise hidden, and have provided us with the opportunity to compare product quality across boundaries,shift from one product item to another, from one production unit to another, easily and without flaw.

Clear advantages today - wishes for tomorrow

- Simultaneously, the solutions have resulted in an automatization of our production journals, as all our central batch documentation today runs on Business Objects. Previously, we dealt with manual procedures with long and heavy paper trails. Today, we merely press a button. All crucial information as regards our documentation to ourselves, our customers and the authorities about how our procedures have been run - such as ingoing raw material specifications, production parameters, temperature measurements and certain laboratory results - is practically fully automated. And runs in exactly the same way in each of our production units. We have complete uniformity, Henrik Behrndt emphasizes.

- As a minor detail, we also use the same solution to print our labels in the laboratories. The micro biological work runs on petri dish, and whereas our production staff previously wrote every sample detail on the dish by hand, we have now connected this work flow to our system, so that it directly shows which sample we have at hand and also prints a line of labels to be pressed directly onto the dish, he explains. The laboratories also use bar codes. When the samples are to be read, the petri dish merely needs to be scanned, and then we have exact knowledge of where to deliver them. - It is not an officially supported feature, but has worked for many years, Henrik Behrndt smiles while adding:

- A system which does not constantly evolve is dead. So even though our solution was complete and fully functional at project golive, we optimize every day seeking new and creative ways to improve. That is also one of the reasons why we chose such an intuitive and visually oriented solution to begin with. And it is one of the reasons why our expectations to the new web based applications are so high.