Quest got a chance to chat with Wilker Costa, the IT manager at Refinaria Nacional de Sal S.A., also known in its native Brazil as Sal Cisne. Wilker’s team has implemented JD Edwards IoT Orchestrator, and he was more than happy to share his team’s experience and lessons learned with us.

Wilker shared some great insight regarding Refinaria Nacional de Sal’s path to digital transformation through upgrades and orchestrations. Here are a few key points other organizations should consider learning from Wilker.

Key Takeaways

About Sal Cisne

Sal Cisne produces around 240 thousand tons of salt per year to human consumption. Their plant is located in Cabo Frio, Rio de Janeiro, and their headquarters is in Sao Paulo. Through their ancillary brands, Sal Cisne and Sal Clipper, they boast 3,000 customers in Latin America in retail and industry channels.

Sal Cisne’s IT team is composed of four operation cells and the company’s workforce is 600 employees strong. They started the JD Edwards ERP project in January of 2013. At that time, the company didn’t have a management integrated system, and systems were developed in-house. The goal was to adopt one new system and improve the business management of integrated data around their operations. During that time, they worked hard in business process review, providing better conditions for ERP implementation. The most important rule at that time was “Don’t customize.” The IT team was asked to use out-of-the-box JD Edwards functionality as often as possible.

Thirteen months later and with only 10 percent of their JD Edwards environment customized, Sal Cisne started to work with JD Edwards enterprise resource planning (ERP) in all company operations. Today they are using JD Edwards in large scale throughout the enterprise, providing conditions to implement integrated systems complementary to their ERP, for example, their logistics system.

In the JD Edwards environment, they use application version 9.1.5 and Tools 9.2.1.4. Starting next year, they will begin a project to change the servers and update all the systems to the latest version.

Sal Cisne has implemented the Financial, Distribution, and Manufacturing modules within JD Edwards. They use all processes inside these modules and BI Publisher to help generate data regarding operations. During their JD Edwards ERP project, they implemented Oracle One View Reporting and User Productivity Kit to create and support the user training. One of the newer resources implemented was JDE IoT Orchestrator, which they use to control the production line (schedule product manufacturing, enable product traceability, etc.) and provide online data capture for their production line.

Regarding their technology footprint, Sal Cisne uses the Sun Microsystem server; Oracle Linux operating system; Oracle VMWare virtualization software; Oracle 11g for their database and Storage Tek SL 150 from Sun Microsystem as a backup. The JD Edwards ERP system is working alongside Oracle Transportation Management in Cloud Service for their Logistics department. Planning and Budget in Cloud Service (PBCS) is dramatically improving their Planning and Control department. They work with JAVA development systems to support some projects and specific business areas, most of them integrated with data from JD Edwards ERP.

How Have You Been Using Orchestrator To Bring Iot To The Jd Edwards Platform?

When we activated the IoT Orchestrator in JD Edwards enterprise resource planning (ERP), we saw the possibility through some orchestrations to capture data and control devices in our working environment. Since this time, we started to create solutions, processes, and resources to improve our daily management with this technology, independent of the area or business process we talk about. To better demonstrate this scenario, now we use the Orchestrator to ensure the correct restorability in shop floor stage because we know in real time all data about the products we manufacture. This is possible due to the IoT Orchestrator inside JD Edwards ERP working with several devices implemented through the manufacturing line.

How are you maximizing efficiency using updated methods of integrating data into your ERP?

The orchestrations in IoT Orchestrator provide us the right conditions to automate the data entry process in our line production, for example. This operation reduces operation mistakes, and we have the product quantity produced online. We reduce the process time and improve data quality.

Which features of the tool have you found most beneficial thus far?

The possibility to work with different devices and control them has been the most beneficial, I think. The integrations scenario is interesting too because we can interact in real time with different business areas and processes, getting data and doing simulations.

Are you deploying a technical, functional or transformational upgrade?

All of them. In our case, we are updating the system version to use all the new features as possible. IoT Orchestrator is one example.

How long did it take to upgrade to a new release?

Our environment is predominantly standard and easy to update. Our worst-case scenario is three months.

Is your whole team ready to step up to advanced functionality?

Since the project kickoff, the company has been providing resources to the IT Team to continue updating their knowledge, while we are also following the news about new versions and features available. The next step is construction—finding what features we need to improve with this new version.

Yes, we constantly pay attention to all the new features JD Edwards ERP has, and we use as many of them as possible. In most cases, we need more time to implement the business process. The system process is much easier.