ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe found itself in the position of needing to replace, step by step, the models it had programmed itself to manage the production of various grades of steel with a solution equipped to face the demands of the future. The solution had to be easy to integrate and designed to be rolled out step by step. ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe uses its automation systems to manage the whole production process at its company steel plants. This is done using clever algorithms that map the functional relationships across all stages of the steel production process. However, there are still a host of other changeable factors that influence the quality of the product obtained, and these also need to be factored in in the form of rules or formulae. What ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe was looking for was a suitable piece of software to fulfill this rule-based management function.

The IT architecture had grown over 15 years and the EDI communication was spread across several EDI server. This involved high efforts which were to be reduced with the introduction of an EAI standard software:- Connection of about 100 partners and 400 customers, exchange of highly heterogeneous message formats, i.e. record structures, EDIFACT, customer specific formats, XML and binary files- Connection to FTP, E-Mail, mailboxes (IBM, Eurolog, Telecom) and MQ-Series- Reduction of maintenance and evaluation efforts, easy tracing of data flows, increase in performance, introduction of central error handling