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Mergetool.com’s NAV Easy Security Enables Marine Harvest to Run a Tight Ship!
Marine Harvest is the world’s leading seafood company, offering farmed salmon and processed seafood to customers in more than 50 markets worldwide. The company is present in all major salmon farming regions in the world and is the biggest producer of farmed salmon, garnering one fifth of the total global production. In addition, Ducktrap River of Maine, a subsidiary of Marine Harvest, is the leader in the Smoked Seafood Industry.
The Challenge
Marine Harvest’s North American operations in Canada and the US handle farming, processing, distribution and sales of fresh and frozen salmon to restaurants and other similar businesses; however, Ducktrap River of Maine, also a subsidiary of Marine Harvest, offers different product lines, including smoked, ready to eat products.
Because of the difference in the products they sell, Marine Harvest and Ducktrap River have different sales processes and pricing models. While Ducktrap River sells to established retail customers with set pricing, in Marine Harvest’s model, sales of their fresh fish can operate much like an auction house, price driven based on availability and demand, so prices can change quickly and dramatically.
Marine Harvest had been successfully using Microsoft Dynamics NAV for 10 years for accounting and operations. However, both Marine Harvest and Ducktrap River were operated out of the same database, which presented some challenges. With an organization of this size and product diversity, the ability to operate each office based upon its specific needs, restricting or allowing abilities of users based on their job function, and controlling the flow of product and maintaining control of inventory was critical. While NAV was working well, it was not designed to provide the ability to address the company’s needs for very specific, record-level permissions and roles for its users.
Ideally, Marine Harvest wanted only specific individuals within the company to have the ability to move inventory or reallocate inventory, or for that matter, even see the available inventory. Marine Harvest wanted to be able to take a very proactive approach to controlling sales within the various markets and have the ability to protect the marine inventory within the company.
Dennis Harris, Plant Manager at Ducktrap River of Maine, was given the task of finding a product that would allow users to be given permissions to access the NAV system based upon their job function and responsibility - a product that would allow a users to see only their customer base, sell only the products available to their customers, and see only pricing information specific to their customers and products. Dennis explained that protecting the data and who has access to view it is critical.
“Much of Marine Harvest’s inventory is unbranded product so each store has a specific product line and pricing,” said Dennis. “Lack of proper security could jeopardize business relations.” The wrong invoice or communication, sent to the wrong person, could be devastating. “Those are the types of things where it’s very important to have a security in place. Not through any malicious intent, but just a simple human error could cost you a million dollars in business –losing data is an inconvenience, losing an account just can’t happen.” Dennis felt that the old system put the pressure on the people in the role rather than on the security of the role.
Another issue was the time it took to set up roles and permissions. “Changes in security took hours or days for minor changes,” said Dennis, “and it was difficult to get them right…we would copy other users rights and still not have what we wanted.”
The Solution
Dennis began searching and initially looked at four different solutions. The first two products looked as though they would not provide ease of operation, while the third did not offer all the options Dennis was looking for, and its price was not competitive. The fourth candidate was NAV Easy Security by Mergetool.com. After watching an online demo, Dennis was intrigued. He called Per Mogensen, owner of Mergetool.com, to discuss the product. After speaking with Per for 20 minutes, Dennis was convinced that Easy Security was the right tool.
Dennis was impressed with the recording tool. Permissions can be recorded when building new roles or updating existing roles. Every data permission with security level and object permissions such as codeunits, reports, forms and pages that needs to be accessed is automatically recorded. Tasks can then be combined to build roles, which are assigned to appropriate users. These roles can be assigned to multiple users, and roles can be adjusted as necessary so the tasks in common with other roles don’t have to be re-recorded.
“The number one thing is the amount of detail you can get on Easy Security and the ease at which you can set roles up, and then you can drill down to every single field,” he said. “It was also easy to edit – easy to go back into a roll and add to the recording as roles change.”
Because NAV Easy Security does not modify any of the base objects within NAV and is actually an application written in NAV, it required no customizations and was very simple to integrate into the company’s NAV solution, even with their existing customizations to the base code. Dennis was also pleased that NAV Easy Security requires very little training: “It took less than two days to set up all users and some of that was simply company logistics.” In less than 20 minutes,
Dennis was able to set up users and create roles that allow people to work at the level they need while still maintaining the integrity of the data.
Other features of NAV Easy Security include:
Source Code Analyzer - Permissions required by the source code can be read and any necessary changes added automatically to build roles or role permissions manually added.
Automated Object-Level Security – The complex, time-consuming task of setting up form-level, report-level, codeunit-level and page-level security for users is automated through object-level permissions in the roles, allowing easy viewing of which object access by user. NAV Easy Security also automatically maintains permissions for the remainder of the objects.
Restore Points - Changes to permissions can be reversed very easily should any problems arise.
Export and import features - Restore Points, Recordings, and Built Roles can be exported and imported, allowing for testing in one database and an easy move to production.
NAV Easy Security also works with both the RoleTailored Client and the Classic Client in NAV.
The Results
Once the company decided to purchase Easy Security from their NAV partner QT Consulting, the process was seamless. Dennis - a plant manager without a technical background - installed Easy Security while he “watched a two-hour video and went along with it during the install.”
On the experience with Easy Security, Dennis said, “It was value priced, easy to install, and easy to maintain. It wins on all three levels of overall cost.”
So what’s next for Marine Harvest North America? After experiencing what Easy Security can do, the company plans to begin utilizing it to its fullest potential. Dennis believes that auditing capabilities within the program will allow them to continue to define roles, improve processes within the company, and evolve into a more efficient organization.
About Mergetool.com
Mergetool.com focuses on delivering products, tools, and services to enhance the performance of Microsoft Dynamics NAV (formerly known as Navision).
About NAV Easy Security
NAV Easy Security for Microsoft Dynamics NAV makes it quick and easy to assign permissions for multiple users across multiple groups and companies - saving you valuable time, money, and resources when setting up security.