Crew Gold

About Infor SunSystems – version 5

Infor SunSystems v5 is a richly featured global financial management solution. Its unique single-ledger design, with strong multi-currency and analysis capabilities, provides an ideal basis for financial reporting. It is complemented by integrated business process functionality for purchasing, sales, and inventory management. Available in a range of languages and configurable to meet varying accounting requirements, Infor SunSystems v5 provides a common accounting solution that can be deployed globally to meet local requirements at the lowest total cost of ownership.

About Mainpac

Mainpac is an enterprise asset management system. Functionality covers operational assets definition, maintenance planning and execution, inventory, purchasing, work order request, project management integration, work safety and financial assets.

About MaxiSun from Sapphire

MaxiSun is a powerful, easy to use ‘plug and play’ interface module that connects any third party business application with SunSystems (or any other Finance/ERP system).  It features a range of inbuilt configuration tools to convert transactions and data held in application tables in non double entry format into double-entry financial data – allowing for automated updates into SunSystems’ ledgers via the destination applications dedicated import tool such as Ledger Import or SunSystems Connect (SSC) functions.

About Crew Gold

Crew Gold Corporation is a UK-based gold mining company, listed on the Toronto and Oslo stock exchanges, holding major assets in Guinea, West Africa.  Crew Gold completed a divestment program of its non-core interests in 2009 to focus on the maximization of the performance of its gold mining operations and exploration projects in West Africa; the Crew Gold mine – LEFA – has a targeted annual production of upwards of 250,000 ounces of gold.

The Requirement

The team at Crew Gold wanted to be able to efficiently pull data directly from Mainpac into SunSystems.   Although there was in interface in place, it wasn’t working very well and had a lot of errors.  “We wanted to find a better solution” explained Bent Froesig, Finance Manager at Crew Gold.

Why MaxiSun and Sapphire

A member of the Crew Gold team had previously held a position at a company that had worked with Sapphire and was familiar with the MaxiSun interface.

Bent got in touch with Sapphire and the team at Crew Gold started out with a meeting during which they explained to the Sapphire team what they wanted and what was possible was discussed.  It was agreed that a test environment would be set up to see how MaxiSun would work with Mainpac. 

The test proved to be successful.  Bent commented “The Sapphire service at this time was excellent.  It was during  the testing that we decided we wanted to do more and implement MaxiSun as soon as possible.”

Key product features that made MaxiSun a good fit for Crew Gold

• It runs automatically, without manual interference
• It posts directly into SunSystems, without a user required to do anything
• It’s flexible.  In theory it can read from any given software based on a sequel database and post into SunSystems

The implementation

“Since we are in the middle of nowhere in Africa, it was decided that mock-up system would be set up in the UK so that we could be trained on MaxiSun, then implement it ourselves” said Bent.

 A step by step plan was created in conjunction with Sapphire for the implementation and MaxiSun went live just two days after the Crew Gold team arrived on site in Guinea.  “We had done heavy testing in advance and all went well”.

Ease of use and team training
“I have found using MaxiSun pretty easy and logical” commented Bent, “during the test phase I sat with Sapphire’s consultant and we decided that I would continue with the programming myself.  We had regular meetings to follow up on the work that I had done and to ensure it was working as planned. 

“I am the main person that uses MaxiSun at the moment; I am training our local team in Guinea to use it so that they can make adjustments themselves.  In the longer term we will have two to three people in Guinea using MaxiSun for their day to day work.”

Benefits MaxiSun is bringing to Crew Gold

• The data from the maintenance system is fed directly into SunSystems electronically, so there are no errors
• Before MaxiSun, data was extracted from Mainpac, opened, checked for anomalies, and then uploaded to SunSystems.  Now the program can be set up so that any weaknesses in the Mainpac data are highlighted and can be corrected quickly and easily
• Significant time saving – well over an hour per day
• The finance department has easier access to data
• The stores department doesn’t have to worry about which transactions go into which period – so long as the correct dates are entered, they will go into the correct area of SunSystems

Bent also tells us: “We recently upgraded to the latest versions of both SunSystems and Mainpac, so we also upgraded to the latest version of MaxiSun.  It is performing quite brilliantly.  MaxiSun runs automatically every night and on the odd occasion that there is an anomaly we receive an alert by email; we are very happy with it.”

Working with Sapphire

“We mostly deal with the consultancy and support teams at Sapphire who we find very easy to work with” said Bent, adding “The support service is pretty good; we encountered some small problems when we upgraded to the new versions.  We communicated via email with the team which worked well for us and the issues were soon worked out. I would recommend working with Sapphire, not least because of the consultants, who really proved their value.”

A final recommendation for MaxiSun from Bent Frosig

“If you need middleware to read data from a third party product into SunSystems, the flexibility of MaxiSun is just perfect, it definitely does the job for us.  The only thing that would be better would be a single integrated system.”

Media contact: Victoria Park +44 (0)20 7648 2008 Victoria.park@sapphiresystems.com