- Vince VXL Success Story -
"Vince Excel (VXL) Worked as a perfect tool for data migration during Infor M3 implementation project"
Arvid Zernell
M3 Business Analyst
Höganäs
Introduction
The company was founded in 1797. Höganäs began life as a coal mining company. Today, Höganäs is the world’s largest metal powders supplier, including sponge iron powder, water atomized powder, and gas atomized powder. Höganäs is owned by FAM and Lindéngruppen and has a turnover of approximately 10.3 MSEK. The company operates in 11 countries and serves customers in 75 countries worldwide.
The challenges
Höganäs chose Infor M3 (M3) as its global ERP system. But as they began to implement major projects relating to upgrades and data updates, it became clear they would benefit from procuring software to support the solution and streamline some of their processes.
At the same time, an important tool Höganäs relied on to handle bulk data updates was removed during a regular software update. Without an alternative within M3 itself, Höganäs needed a new solution to handle mass data updates safely and controlled, preferably without using SQL.
Choosing the right tools
Höganäs invested in Vince Excel (VXL) to support their daily use of M3, and also to replace the vital update and data maintenance tool that was no longer available after the latest update of M3. And since VXL uses APIs, the security of mass updates was actually improved while avoiding SQL entirely.
Around this time, Höganäs was also working on a project to migrate one of their new businesses from SAP to M3. VXL proved to be an invaluable tool during this process, handling data migrations and providing a solid foundation for new business data in M3.
Today, Höganäs uses Vince Excel to manage procurement more efficiently, update, and maintain prices seamlessly within the application. These kinds of tasks (and many others) can be managed much more quickly and simply within VXL than is possible within M3, which saves time and reduces manual work. As a result, data-related changes that would previously have been managed by the IT department can now be handled directly by the relevant business teams, with no IT intervention whatsoever.
Summary
Vince Excel (VXL) has made a huge difference in the way Höganäs uses Infor M3. Not only has it replaced (and improved upon) key functionality that no longer existed in the latest version of M3, it has also helped to dramatically simplify data management, reduce the amount of time taken to complete a wide variety of tasks, and moved much of the responsibility for managing and maintaining M3 data from IT.