The Latest and Greatest

1. Vol. 3 No. 21 Your Connection to the NPI SEGMENT 3 Oracle Roll-out and Beyond September 2008 The Latest and Greatest As we discussed in the last edition of the Segment 3 newsletter it’s time again provide a brief snapshot of where we stand but more importantly where we are headed as a Company with Oracle. The goal of this newsletter is to continue to keep you informed of those improvements or changes by business area or department, and as usual we appreciate your continued support, commitment, and participation!! • Functional Area Updates • CUSTOMER SERVICE (OTC) • Fine Paper document enhancements have been made and this helps the ability to display and bill customers in lineal feet and payment summary on invoices. • Changes were made on several Fine Paper documents to allow us to display and bill customers in linear feet. This was a great example of a cross functional effort to achieve needed functionality for several important customers. • A Fine Paper contract database was launched and the new functionality has been reviewed with the sales and customer service teams. The centralized database allowed us to replace several disparate files/documents used in the past, and it is also proving to be a critical component as we implement the September 29th price increase. FINANCE (ATR) • Efforts to tap General Ledger financial data for management reporting are continuing.  Cost of Manufacturing (COM) data is available through the Oracle FSG (Financial Statement Generator) report writing features.  Changes in account usage have allowed the Fine Paper team to restore material usage visibility to the General Ledger. • All Mills are now downloading Oracle cost data into macs.  Appleton & Ripon came on board in July.  Sales transactional data is also being pulled into macs and will better facilitate customer profitability reporting. • Independent 3rd parties are continuing with their audit of Segment 3 conversion activities. • HUMAN RESOURCES (HTR) • The Vacation Policy accrual method for salaried employees will change effective January 1, 2009. Each month an employee will earn 1/12 of his/her new year’s vacation allotment. In the Oracle Employee Self-Service functionality, the Paid Time Off (PTO) balance format will change to reflect this policy revision. Spotlight on Information Technology What is all this talk about environments and refreshes, and what does it mean??? ENVIRONMENTS: An environment can be defined as the entire set of conditions under which one operates a computer, as it relates to the hardware, operating platform, or operating system.  Basically, environments allow us to separate our system into distinct areas for development, quality assurance, and production. Here at NPI we have three main environments: PDEV, QA1, and PROD.  PDEV is our development environment and is used by IT for developing fixes, modifications, and enhancements for our system. QA1 is our quality assurance environment.  All of our final acceptance testing is done here before being moved into production. PROD is our production environment.  This is where our live business systems and data reside. We also have QA2, HR, and TRNG which are used periodically for quality assurance, Human Resources, and Training. REFRESHES: A refresh is simply replacing what is in a development or quality assurance environment with a copy of what is in the production.  This is done to ensure that all development, testing, and training are done in an environment that is as close to being a carbon copy of our production environment as possible. Environment refreshes are scheduled on an as needed basis.  Need Help with Oracle? U.S. – 1.866.214.8970 or via email:  _NPI, Help Desk   (24 hours a day / 7 days a week)