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Danisco Sugar Leverages ITF Solutions

The Company's Challenge:
Implementing an architected structure for its Notes installation to permit the fast development and easy maintenance of business applications.

In an organization such as Danisco Sugar, each employee works with many different documents. Each will store these according to his or her own system - if such a system exists. The difficulties arise when a group of people want to make changes to a common document.

A lack of organization and coordination on this scale causes people to lose confidence in the electronic method of document organization and handling. How do you find and then organize the documents? How can you take control of your documents? With an eye towards collaboration, Danisco looked to IT Factory for the right infrastructure solution.

A strategic messaging solution
In 1995 Danisco management made the decision to use Lotus Notes as the messaging infrastructure for the entire company. The company believed that Notes represented the best solution for its large and growing company. The system would cater to the needs of Danisco's four sectors - Sugar, Ingredients, Pack and Food and Flexible.

Following the infrastructure decision, Björn Johansson, IT project manager for Danisco Sugar in Sweden, was faced with the challenge of implementing Lotus Notes. The initial focus was on the Swedish subsidiary's messaging and document storage infrastructure.

Whenever implementing Notes, a major step to overcome is simply to persuading the company's employees to use the full capabilities of the technology. Unfortunately, a significant number of users believe that Notes can only be used as a messaging system.

Thankfully, for Danisco Sugar, Johansson has always seen Notes as more than a mail system - he has always been able to see the potential of using Notes for collaboration and cooperation tasks. Johansson sensed there was another level of capability that Danisco Sugar wasn't using to the fullest - this was the potential of applying Notes to the concept of knowledge management.

Avoiding application anarchy
On top of these concerns, Danisco Sugar wanted to avoid the potential pitfalls of Notes application development. Specifically, Danisco Sugar was concerned about building Notes applications that they couldn't control. Questions such as how they'd be used, who'd use them and how much they'd be used; who the key sponsor of the application would be or even how relevant the applications were, figured prominently.

More importantly, the company desperately wanted to avoid finding itself left with numerous applications that lacked a common structure, strategy, or clear direction for their future development - a condition known as "application anarchy". Once the anarchy exists, it is hard to erradicate and regain the initiative.

An architecture and tools suite for structured application development
Through the support of Lotus Business Partner NCL, Danisco Sugar's Johansson followed up on the products of IT FACTORY - something he had first encountered at the Lotusphere exhibition in Berlin in 1998. Johansson was quickly convinced of the merit of the ITF Architecture concept and the technical functionality of both ITF Business Suite applications and ITF Tools Suite.

Johansson subsequently set to work redeveloping his company's existing Notes applications to base them on the ITF Architecture through the ITF Tools Suite, ITF Human Resources and ITF Help Desk applications. In fact, Johansson learned that ITF could assist his team in every aspect of development, maintenance and growth of his Notes based applications.

Johansson sees the Notes/ITF combination as a powerful weapon against potential competitors. For example, Danisco Sugar, like many other major corporations, is rapidly expanding through the purchase of other enterprises. Johansson recognizes that a significant determinant of success in such expansion is the effective management of the collaboration infrastructure.

Johansson feels that Notes and ITF provide the necessary level of structured collaboration infrastructure to ensure that they stay one step ahead of competitors who are struggling to integrate and develop non-architected applications.

The best tools for the job
The positive results of the ITF implementation at Danisco Sugar can be seen in any number of factors - return on investment, speed of development, or ease of maintenance. But the factor that best exemplifies the impact of IT FACTORY is the effect that it has had on Johansson and his team of developers. Johansson simply won't work on any Notes development without using ITF Tools Suite.