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Steel Technologies Controls Inventory With WebFOCUS and iWay
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Middleware, SDKs & Libraries
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Automotive
- Consumer Goods
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Logistics & Transportation
- Warehouse & Inventory Management
Use Cases
- Inventory Management
- Predictive Maintenance
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Steel Technologies, a steel processor with 24 facilities located throughout the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, needed to carefully track steel as it moves through the supply chain. This was one of the main factors that motivated the company to acquire business intelligence (BI) and integration technology from Information Builders. The company's customers expect to see an accounting of every pound of steel that they process, including scrap. As a $2 billion company, a large portion of Steel Technologies' capital is tied up in inventory. The company uses business intelligence to keep a finger on the pulse of where their inventory stands at any point in time. They use integration technology to load their data mart and simplify their EDI connections. Before the implementation of iWay, Steel Technologies had unique EDI maps for every trading partner. They were maintaining hundreds of maps, which made it difficult to respond in a timely fashion to new business requirements. They had a tremendous backlog of requests to add new trading partners.
About The Customer
Steel Technologies is a steel processor with 24 facilities located throughout the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The company is the eighth largest steel service center/processor in North America. Steel Technologies processes flat rolled steel coils from producing mills throughout North America to customer-specific thickness, length, and width tolerances for the automotive, HVAC, appliance, lawn and garden, agriculture, construction, office furniture, and consumer goods industries. The company is valued at $2 billion and a large portion of its capital is tied up in inventory. The company's customers expect to see an accounting of every pound of steel that they process, including scrap.
The Solution
Steel Technologies worked with Information Builders’ Professional Services to create a data mart, several major BI applications, and dozens of InfoApps™ and reports. They used iWay Service Manager to create one common EDI platform, iWay DataMigrator to create the data mart, and WebFOCUS to establish a common platform for reporting and analysis. Champion Solutions Group, an Information Builders partner, assisted with the implementation. As part of the modernization project, Steel Technologies replaced legacy EDI interfaces with new iWay interfaces. The company now has one middleware backbone that sorts out all the variations of these many different interfaces, streamlining onboarding of new trading partners and simplifying maintenance of the middleware environment. Steel Technologies also uses iWay to create secure transport interfaces with banking partners and SaaS providers including cloud-based HR and payroll systems. The IT team used iWay DataMigrator to create star schemas and data marts as well as to import data from a DB2/400 database on an IBM iSeries platform to a Microsoft SQL Server platform.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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