Ocean Nutrition finds Clarity with document management

Ocean Nutrition, the world’s largest producer of Omega-3 (think “fish oil”), has production facilities around the world and a global customer base. Hundreds of clients add Ocean Nutrition’s product to a wide range of food items and dietary supplements.

It’s a complex business and Megan Harris, CFO for Ocean Nutrition, found that there was a lack of validation and linkage in the company’s spreadsheets.

“We were not only looking for a unified corporate performance management (CPM) solution, but also for vendors that understood our industry and could help us share and pull information together quickly and easily.”

Addressing key concerns
Ocean Nutrition tracks sales growth and profitability by account, region and segment and runs reports at every level such as sales by segment, by account representative, by territory and by customer. Before deploying the Clarity performance management solution it took the finance team over a month to create month-end reports, whereas now it takes only seven days.

Users can now identify spending patterns, variances, and attainment of tactical plans to make the appropriate adjustments to their tactics and strategies. Ocean Nutrition implemented a central repository approach to ensure everyone is basing their decisions on the same information.

This has created one source of information and one version of the truth to achieve consistency within the organization and ensure optimal operations.

“The audit trail component of the system provides comprehensive data lineage, which lets us quickly identify what information has changed, who changed it and when,” says Harris. “This has created a high level of data integrity as information on sales, customers, product development and so on is accurate and current.”

Budgets, forecasts, and actual results are now easily updated and can be viewed at any time. And all the manufacturing overhead costs and departmental expenses are tracked in Clarity 6. Ocean Nutrition can also capture actual and forecasted sales by customer and product SKU to monitor growth and customer profitability.

Better information access
Clarity’s repository can access and standardize information from hundreds of spreadsheets and the ERP system.

Although collaboration for budgeting, planning and forecasting is ensured by Clarity 6, with its web-based access and common repository, Ocean Nutrition knew that there was other operational information to be shared and worked on by multiple units and users across the organization.

Enter MS SharePoint, or specifically, WSS 3.0 (Windows SharePoint Server), which was chosen as a general solution for sharing files, collaboration, and communication.

David K. Thomson, Senior Director of Supply Chain & Technology, Ocean Nutrition, finds that this is a great solution for wrapping policies and procedures around document management and allowing departments to manage access and versioning of their own information.

“SharePoint does that very well,” says Thomson. “Overall, it has proven to be a good solution to share information, access data and aid inter-company collaboration. Our next steps will include building some BI tools to integrate with our core ERP,” says Thomson.

Find out more at www.claritysystems.com.