October 2015, the Nuscience Group opened its new, “state-of-the-art”, premix factory in Drongen, Belgium. The new plant replaced the previous production facilities in Baasrode and Drongen and enabled the company to double its production to 120000 tons a year. The factory features the latest in automation and process optimization by using best practices and innovations from several other industries.
Apart from the new plant in Drongen the Nuscience group has multiple other sites all over the world, including in Brazil, China and the Netherlands. This allows the group to act as a global player in a growing market.
A global business
Managing multiple production facilities and supplying customers all over the world is very demanding for any organisation. To efficiently handle all supporting processes (sales, purchase, finance, …), Nuscience decided to contact Adifo, specialist in software for the premix industry.
“We were looking for an ERP solution that could support the specifics of our business and bring us to a higher level of automation” say Chris Mercier, CTO for Nuscience Group and Dirk De Baets, General Manager Nuscience Belgium. “Our ERP solution needs to efficiently support various specifics in relation to product, recipe and quality management. The ERP solution needs to guarantee the timely inflow of materials, the timely transfer of those materials for production, as well as the proper handling for MTS or MTO delivery. It is built for tight integration with our plant automation software. As a base, we’ve chosen MILAS AX, an industry-specific solution of Adifo for the premix industry.”
Adifo's Project manager explains: “Adifo has focused on the feed industry since 1974. Over the years we have built up an enormous amount of knowledge about the industry. This knowledge is reflected both in our software and in our employees. Because of our experience and reputation, Nuscience decided to implement Microsoft Dynamics AX and the sector-specific MILAS AX modules at their factory in the Netherlands as a test in 2013.
A new ERP implementation for a greenfield plant in 9 months
“A clear commitment from the Nuscience Group and a proper dedication of resources allowed for implementation of Microsoft Dynamics AX and the industry-specific MILAS AX modules at 3 different plants within a time frame of 2 years. Starting with the factories in the Netherlands and Hungary, we moved on to the new factory in Belgium at the beginning of 2015.” Adifo's project manager explains.
The full stack - almost all standard Microsoft Dynamics AX and MILAS AX modules have been used - is completely integrated with MES at all plants. The solution covers finance, purchasing, sales, production, planning up to WMS functionality, with bidirectional interfaces with the MES plant software. Processes have been largely optimized to require a minimum of manual input. With this investment, Nuscience Group is well shaped for further growth.