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Mergetool.com’s NAV Easy Security streamlines compliance for Wood Group GTS Power Plant Services

Wood Group GTS Power Plant Services group serves simple cycle power plants, cogeneration facilities, and combined heat and power centers. With 25 years of experience and expertise in both operating power plants and overhauling and maintaining rotating equipment, the company helps enhance the operational performance and system reliability of their customers’ power generation assets through turbine maintenance solutions that minimize downtime, increase turbo-machinery availability and reduce the overall operating costs.

The Challenge

Since 2003, GTS Power Plant Services has been providing market leading operations and maintenance, repair, and overhaul services to companies all over the world. The company is under Gas Turbine Services, one of three companies within Wood Group, an international energy services company with $5 billion in revenues. An organization of such size and on an international scale must maintain consistent standards across all of its companies to ensure smooth operations and secure business practices. GTS Power Plant Services must adhere to the strict internal audit standards required of all Wood Group companies.

Wood Group internal audit requirements included segregation of duties and system permissions by job function. The company also needed to be able to review specific data and reports.

GTS Power Plant Services had to implement measures to meet these strict requirements very quickly—without disrupting business operations. GTS Power Plant Services has been successfully using Microsoft Dynamics NAV for five years for accounting, operations, procurement, and IS. Approximately 100 employees use the software in various capacities, requiring different levels and types of permissions, depending on job function and responsibility. Because it can be challenging to discern where conflicts in job responsibilities might occur, requiring duties to be segregated, the company wanted to use a role-based model for this function. Also, because each power plant is set up as a different company in NAV, employees also have different permissions by company.

It would be possible to set up, report, and manage security within NAV, but Antoine Geffriaud, Manager of ERP Systems and Development, and Steve Kersch, Program Manager, ERP Projects, came to the conclusion that, based on the complexity of the company’s needs, a tool specifically designed for working with segregation of duties and system permissions was the best approach.

Antoine and Steve looked at several of these tools. “We found them to be complex, ‘heavy,’ unable to integrate well with NAV, and expensive,” said Antione. So they approached their Microsoft Partner, SCS, to discuss their needs. SCS recommended NAV Easy Security for Microsoft Dynamics NAV by Mergetool.com, a solution that allows companies to easily and quickly set up their own security, set permissions for logins, and build roles. The product also has a Role Center for maintaining security, providing one centralized location to manage permissions.

The Solution

Antoine and Steve contacted Per Mogensen, owner of Mergetool.com and developer of NAV Easy Security for a demonstration of the product. After seeing the product in action, they were sold. “When I saw it, I said, Viola! Here’s our solution. Let’s get with it,” said Steve. “It was so starkly different and functionally enabled…it was light years ahead.”

NAV Easy Security makes it quick and easy for companies to assign permissions for multiple users across multiple groups and companies by automating much of the process, saving valuable time and money—and freeing up IT resources for other important projects.

Antoine and Steve were impressed with the recording tool. Permissions can be recorded when building new roles or updating existing roles. Every record, codeunit, form, report, table, security level that needs to be accessed is automatically recorded by the client monitor. 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.

Because NAV Easy Security does not modify any of the base objects within 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.

Antoine and Steve were also pleased that NAV Easy Security requires very little training, and setup is wizard-driven, making it faster for them to meet corporate requirements.

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 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 (Recording permissions requires the Client Monitor, available only in the Classic Client in versions of Dynamics NAV 2009).

The Results

Once the company decided to purchase NAV Easy Security, Mergetool.com went on-site and provided training. After only 3 hours of training and “a couple of hours follow up 2 days later,” the Power Plant Services team was able to take over recording and defining of roles. They started with the finance team and were extremely pleased with the process.  

“From the date of purchase, it took only 14 days to get the first users up and running on their new roles,” said Antoine. “This process would otherwise have taken months.”

 The time to set up a role manually could take up to 2 hours, but with NAV Easy Security, it takes 5 minutes, and 90-95% of the tasks were accurate after only one recording.

On the experience of working with Mergetool.com, Antoine said, “It was great. They were very helpful, very available…which was key in the implementation. They even came out here to train us personally.”

So what’s next for GTS Power Plant Services? The company plans to upgrade to the Role Tailored version of NAV 2009 and is happy that NAV Easy Security will evolve with their NAV solution.

About Mergetool.com

Mergetool.com focuses on delivering services, tools, and products to enhance the performance of Microsoft Dynamics NAV (formerly known as Navision). For more information, visit us at www.mergetool.com.

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. For more information, visit www.naveasysecurity.com.


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