For Heijmans Infrastructure, one of the divisions of the Heijmans Group, time registration is crucial. It is one of the most important elements to measure project progress and costs.  

As we use the ERP system BaaN IV, every time entry must end up in this system. Since only a limited group of ERP Administrative Users had access to the time registration module in BaaN, project managers, team leaders, workers,… had to work with off-line input. 

Most commonly, project members filled out a MS Excel sheet with time entries per person and per project and they had to send it to a central ERP Admin department. They made the input in the ERP system.  

We were not satisfied with this way of working as it caused too much administration and mistakes.   

Our objective was to let the project members make the input immediately in our BaaN-application. But, customizing our application to provide our users the user friendliness they desired required high investments.

Therefore, we started building a web based input application for the BaaN Time Registration system. The concept of splitting the front and back end application, proved to be very good. This custom portal satisfied our needs. 

Yet, custom build portals bring about very high development and maintenance costs. We wanted to reduce these and decided to switch to the MS SharePoint platform. For integrating our ERP with MS SharePoint, we came into contact with Ometa and its solution for linking the ERP system with the MS SharePoint environment. 

Heijmans had the following requirements: 

• All open projects/tasks from BaaN must be visible in the front application (no additional project/task creation & maintenance) 
• No reprogramming of the ERP business logic in the new front application 
• Only people (payroll or external) that currently work for Heijmans can register time (no additional maintenance of people in the front application) 
• It must be easy to grant/deny time registration rights on projects to individuals or groups  
• It must be possible to register project and not-project (e.g. holiday) related hours 
• It must be possible for project managers/team leaders to register time for their workers/colleagues 
• It must be possible to copy time entry schedules from past weeks to this week or to get them to other people 
• After submitting the time registration, there must still be a review by the central time registration unit that can accept (final acceptance in BaaN) or not accept (back to user) the time registration  

Ometa defined a time registration application in MS SharePoint and linked the fields to the BaaN-system via the Ometa Integrator Solution. All requirements were met. 

After 5 weeks a pilot project could be started. This testing resulted in some updates, but less than 3 months after the start of the project, we accepted the solution and the roll out could start for the first groups within the Heijmans Infrastructure division. 

Example: BaaN screen to insert/update time entries

Example: Time Registration Portal integrated with BaaN

Company Profile Snapshot 

Number of employees: 11 636. Sales 2007: 3 731 900 000 USD 

(Source: Wright Investors' Service) 

Heijmans NV. The Group's principal activities are to provide products and services in the building, property development and related industries. They operate in four segments: Property Development, Building, Infrastructure and Technical Services. Property Development provides the initiation, development and sale of buildings. Building focuses on building housing accommodation, including maintenance and service, in all segments of the market. Infrastructure focuses on design, consulting, execution and maintenance activities for different kinds of building and infrastructure activities. Technical Services designs, implements and maintains complete electrical en mechanical engineering installations in the healthcare, government and semi-government, commercial property, education and high-tech clean room sectors. It operates in the Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain and Germany.