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NIBULON is one of Ukraine’s largest grain exporters and agricultural producers with a total land area of 76,000 hectares. The company invests in creating a sustainable food security ecosystem, based on relations between NIBULON and more than 4,500 Ukrainian agricultural producers aimed at ensuring the supply of quality agricultural products to 76 countries. To support this ecosystem, the company relies on a digital and logistics infrastructure including a network of 23 elevator facilities, a truck and railroad fleet, and 83 boats.

Project

Together with IT-Enterprise specialists, the NIBULON team completed a major overhaul and digitalization within one of its most process-intensive projects: quantitative and qualitative accounting of the elevator network. This solution is based on the IT-Enterprise no-code/low-code platform.

The project was deployed as part of the systematic development and improvement of NIBULON’s IT infrastructure. The company prioritizes this strategy as one of the key opportunities to restore its competitive potential in domestic and foreign markets.

The project goals included improving NIBULON’s competitiveness in domestic and foreign markets, implementing end-to-end digitalization, and business automation.

ERP system upgrade

The first step in this direction was to upgrade the IT-Enterprise ERP system to the latest version. Next, the project team carried out automation using state-of-the-art IT tools and approaches for HR and payroll, electronic document management, finance, treasury, and accounting in compliance with national regulations and international financial reporting standards (IFRS).

These areas formed the digital core of NIBULON that ensured the integrated operation of business processes. It was also a prerequisite for implementing one of the company’s most labor-intensive transformation projects: quantitative and qualitative accounting for the elevator network.

Quantitative and qualitative accounting

Quantitative and qualitative accounting is a key process in elevator complexes. Its efficiency has a direct impact on the profitability of NIBULON’s elevator business.

The project for optimizing quantitative and qualitative accounting covered the reengineering of business processes for grain accounting and deployment of new logistics and costing processes.

With a new, more efficient process version of quantitative and qualitative accounting, NIBULON can now automatically track grain movement, its key indicators and the cost of processing and logistics: from grain receipt at the elevator to shipment to the end consumer. This allows the company to calculate the exact cost of production and based on this, see the profitability. As a result, NIBULON teams can take action at any stage to improve the financial and customer service KPIs.

Steps to ensure accurate and reliable quantitative and qualitative accounting:

• selection and write-off of stock balances from several storage locations
• adoption of standard formats for grain accounting at the company’s branches
• review of actual analytics
• three KPI values are analyzed at the same time: actual, to be approved, accounting

Benefits of unified and optimized business processes for quantitative and qualitative accounting:

• suitable for any transport or any branch
• ability to replicate the existing processes when opening a new branch
• receipt, shipment and movement of grain, movement order management
• depersonalized accounting at all branches
• up-to-date information on the status of stock balances at any elevator at any time

‘Digital elevator’

NIBULON transitioned to a ‘100% digital elevator’ model, where the operating principle is based on the management and coordination of all processes through digital systems. This concept was scaled to all 23 elevator complexes of NIBULON.

In practical terms, a ‘digital elevator’ suggests the use of multiple digital tools, such as:

• e-card for laboratory testing of grain (quality control)
• automatic integration with equipment
• introduction of new calculation modes along with extra regulatory and reference information
• managing the process batches of grain (created at the enterprise)
• work with leased warehouses
• ability to switch to accounting for primary grain batches (incoming, received by the elevator)

An important outcome here is the possibility of automatic creation and tracking of so-called licensed batches that have to meet stricter quality requirements. All these measures improved quality control, automated accounting processes, and optimized the management of grain stock balances at NIBULON’s elevators.

Project results

• automatic batch tracking of the from its receipt at one elevator to shipment from another elevator
• automatic calculation of logistical costs for each grain batch
• advanced image recognition integrated with equipment: photo registration of the vehicles during grain transportation
• using barcodes for identifying lab test samples/results and depersonalized record-keeping
• chatbot integration to support the key grain movement operations at the elevator
• integration with Ukrzaliznytsia railway company for immediate cost tracking
• automatic reporting for costs per primary (incoming) batch/ton
• waste write-off during grain processing proportionally from each primary batch

Project features

The digitalization project unified accounting processes at all branches of NIBULON and improved integration with equipment and third-party systems. All these steps ensured efficient business process management.

Watch a case study video on the project results here