CONAPROLE, ANCAP, ZENDA, Establecimientos Colonia, and SAMAN are the top 5 exporting companies in Uruguay. All of them use, to some degree, GeneXus technology as a tool.
CONAPROLE (Cooperativa Nacional de Productores de Leche) (National Dairy Producers Cooperative) is the top exporter in Uruguay. Its products are sold in over 50 countries; last year it exported a total of U$S 173,925,004. In 1992 CONAPROLE bought its first GeneXus license (running on DOS environment and generating COBOL code for AS/400); but the number has steadily increased. In 1999, CONAPROLE decided that it was necessary to install an ERP (SAP’s R/3); but since the system did not cover a variety of business specific functionalities or satellite systems, the work with GeneXus integrated to SAP remained the best option.
Ricardo Schaich, Manager of CONAPROLE’s IT Department states that “without a doubt, GeneXus is today the development tool of choice for this type of situations. Additionally, but not less importantly, GeneXus has facilitated the integration of these systems and functionalities with our R/3 back office system, enabling also the incorporation and integration of different technologies such as mobile equipment, web solutions, etc.”
ANCAP, the state fuel company, was the second largest exporter in 2006: In that year the oil company exported goods for U$S 137,979,269. At the beginning of 2006 ANCAP started to implement a Data warehousing solution developed with GeneXus and GXplorer and the perspectives couldn’t have been better. ANCAP’s manager of Commercial Diagnosis, Juan José Aristoy, says that the solution “will be a life changing tool. ANCAP will be a different company after this tool”.
The solution takes information daily from the invoicing system data base which contains data of the last four years of ANCAP’s seven plants, over 3,000 clients and more than 600 products processed and sold by the state company. Until now, "70% of the man hours of this area were devoted to collecting and entering data to the previous system and 30% to analysis", because to access the analysis level they had to reenter the data in the Excel spreadsheet in order to obtain different views of the same reality. "We now have it in 5 minutes and it frees us from merely processing data", stated Aristoy. But the words of the Marketing manager of ANCAP, Daniel Porrini, were much more conclusive: “it’s the first time we have the tool we wanted, so we can do what we need to do the way we want to”.
SAMAN is the top rice exporter in Latin America. In 1994 it faced a problem that needed a fast solution. “We realized that maintaining the existing applications required more effort every day and we couldn’t progress in generating new applications that were necessary” stated Gerardo Servetti, Deputy IT Manager of SAMAN. The next year the decision was made to use GeneXus as a development tool. “We realized that development was much more friendly, fast and especially, efficient. We already thought it would be more friendly and speedy, but what surprised me was the efficiency” commented Servetti. This efficiency was manifested in the time saved in application encoding and writing, so we could use this time to design a better data base. Additionally, another advantage of working with GeneXus is that the end user can see the progress in the prototype, so you can correct any problems before the application goes into production.
“Currently our consolidated KB has over 15,000 GeneXus objects, developed entirely in SAMAN with just 3 programmers. I can’t imagine what development would be like today if there wasn’t a tool like this. Actually, these figures could not be sustained” assured Gerardo Servetti.