The company that runs three nuclear power plants at
Sellafield in West Cumbria is re-engineering its business processes
to realise business benefits from an enterprise resource planning
system that it implemented two years ago.
"To minimise the impact on the business, we did not change
processes when we implemented the ERP system. We are now embarking
on the next phase, which will significantly enhance functionality,"
said Richard Davison, site maintenance systems manager at British
Nuclear Group.
Speaking at software supplier Lawson's annual user conference,
Davison said that British Nuclear Group would automate business
processes by developing interfaces between its
Lawson M3 ERP
system and its finance, HR and document management
applications.
British Nuclear Group will be awarded performance bonuses from
the Department of Trade & Industry if it meets cost-cutting
targets.
The company plans to link M3 with its SAP financial management
application,
PeopleSoft Enterprise HR and a
Documentum
document management system.
As well as removing manual intervention from many of its core
processes, British Nuclear Group said the move would enable
improved parts ordering and cut the time taken to complete repairs
or place one-off orders.
It expects to spend between £2.8m and £2.9m before the end of
2008 on the project. This sum is in addition to the £3m that was
spent deploying the ERP system in 2005.
The project has been made more urgent because British Nuclear
Group relies on legacy systems for some of its core business
processes. These will no longer be used once the interfaces between
Lawson and the other applications are in place.
Davison said, "We have an asset management system on the site
that we did not bring across to Lawson in the first phase. It has
been around for 15 years and there is one man who looks after it
who will shortly retire."
Although British Nuclear Group operates Sellafield and the
Low-Level Waste Repository at neighbouring Drigg, the power plants
themselves are owned by a DTI quango called the Nuclear
Decommissioning Authority.
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