Kystdesign improves business insight with Arribatec
By using Power BI integration with RamBase ERP
Who is Kystdesign?
Kystdesign AS is a Norwegian technology company specializing in developing and producing remotely operated underwater robots (ROVs) and associated equipment for underwater use. They have had impressive growth in recent years through the delivery of tailor-made, high-tech solutions to the oil and gas industry, fish farming, marine research, search/rescue, and marine. The solutions they provide help their customers conduct inspections, maintenance, and underwater repairs, among other things.
Kystdesign places high demands on quality and documentation in all parts of the deliveries, which was also decisive in their decision to choose RamBase ERP as their cloud-based ERP platform in 2021.
Kystdesign’s innovative ZeeROV, an all-electric ROV (remotely operated underwater robot) with an impressive power management system that provides increased power and better maneuverability
What reporting challenges did Kystdesign have?
Previously, Kystdesign had to compile its reports with extracts from RamBase manually. This was a manual and time-consuming process that Kystdesign wanted to improve. Although RamBase comes with many good standard reports relevant to different roles in the company, Kystdesign wanted the opportunity to get an even better and dynamic overall overview via specific reports, trends and analyses. They wanted to adapt reports to a greater extent in a more modern BI platform, with the flexibility to consolidate data across modules in RamBase. It was also important to facilitate reporting from other data sources in the long term.
PowerBI and RamBase Cloud ERP
RamBase ERP and Power BI are integrated seamlessly through a reporting solution developed by Arribatec. This integration leverages APIs, Azure Data Factory, and SQL connections to pull data from RamBase and deliver it directly into Power BI through a data model set up for the customer’s reporting needs.
The solution provides access to interactive reports and visualizations covering areas such as finance, sales, project management, and production. The data can be combined with other data sources for a holistic analysis. In other words, this solution will meet Kystdesign’s current needs but also be scalable and ready for any new needs in the future.
Positive partnership with Arribatec:
Tore Nedland, CFO of Kystdesign, is very happy with the collaboration with Arribatec and has been effective in getting started with the Power BI integration for RamBase. The solution was delivered with some standard reports and technical setup while allowing Arribatec to address the need for new reports early in the project. This was the start of a good collaboration where, together with Kystdesign, we discussed further development of reports to meet our needs for various analysis purposes.
Practical examples of reports that Arribatec has developed for Kystdesign:
Dashboards: Typically used to present various reports or key figures across, e.g. revenue, product categories, product types and trends. More detailed invoice reports have also been developed that show customer, product and project development with Drilldown functionality down to invoice lines.
Time and resource reporting:
- Effective insight into the deviation and causal relationships between planned and accrued time on productions, operations and projects.
- An overview of the resources involved, what they have worked on and the time they have spent on the various productions and operations. This is important to capture time spent, deviations and comments, but also to obtain experience figures on projects and operations, which can help optimise future deliveries to other customers
- Provides insight into the productive time spent on resources in production, allowing Kystdesign to measure efficiency, identify bottlenecks and optimise the utilisation of available resources.
Provides insight into trends and thus makes planning and adjustments easier. Colour codes help visualise deviations easily and provide easier control against any errors
Machine report hourly use:
• Provides similar data capture as in the Resource Report and a KPI overview from, for example, CNC machines in different periods.
• Shows planned time, changeover time, runtime and total time aggregated per machine, but also against productions. Colour codes help to visualise deviations easily.
Machinery costs:
• Shows the different machines with material, hourly and total costs in different periods, which helps to provide insight into trends and value contributions on the different machines
• Provides detailed insight into costs per production order on the various machines (compared to “planned”). This will give Kystdesign a better basis for decision-making to adjust its deliveries, investments and focus areas in the future for increased competitiveness.
Inventory:
• Provides detailed information about how inventory is allocated, including work-in-progress items and their association with specific projects. It also shows the status of the items – whether they have been picked, are in the process of picking, or are waiting to be picked for production. Due to limited API functionality in some archives in RamBase, the report combines data from an automated report export to a database and data retrieved via API. The solution that has been developed simplifies the compilation and enables a correct accrual of deliveries that extend over several periods
What effects has Kystdesign experienced by implementing the Power BI solution with RamBase Cloud ERP?
“Arribatec’s Power BI solution for RamBase provides a better overall picture of the drivers in our business so that we can make the right decisions through a real-time picture. The solution provides unique insight into the parameters that are important for optimizing our production and contributes to better use of our resources. At the same time, the solution helps us make better use of our machinery and deliver our projects on time and at the right cost.
The consolidation of data from RamBase has made it easier for us to gain the necessary insight into previously fragmented data. Insight into developments on customers and resources (employees and machines against projects, orders and operations, etc.) helps us adapt our business, which helps us become an even better and more competitive employer and supplier in the future.
We plan to develop the Power BI solution further in several ways. It will give us even better insight into ERP processes, but also consolidated reports against other core systems/data sources,” says Tore Nedland, CFO of Kystdesign.”
Tore Nedland, CFO of Kystdesign AS
