On May 1, 2004, LIMS and WeighWiz have gone live at three of Boise’s paper mills, its Northwest Fiber Procurement division and Timberland Resources division.
Boise is benefiting from LIMS in the form of greater efficiency for their monthly financial closing process. With their old legacy computer systems, Boise was limited to processing most data and viewing their business reports at month-end. Accountants were limited to approximately one week to find and fix all the errors that had accumulated over the month. Now, LIMS has enabled them to see ‘real-time’ reports on a daily basis allowing personnel to find errors the day after they occur. The stress of the end-of-month crunch has been reduced and the ability to find mistakes has greatly increased.
LIMS has allowed Boise’s IT infrastructure to be greatly simplified. The previous layout had separate legacy systems on Mainframes and AS/400 computers for each division. Manual data entry to distribute legacy system data into a Peoplesoft financial system was required because the legacy systems were not designed to provide the level of detail managed by a contemporary ERP or accounting system. LIMS has been designed to work seamlessly with Peoplesoft resulting in a reduction in the time for completing tedious and unproductive data entry. It also provides the front end which has allowed the consolidation of all detailed information into a single database. Not only has the IT infrastructure been simplified, the business processes have as well.
At this time, our dedicated development team is assisting the Boise’s users to use LIMS to its full capability.