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Tempered Vertical

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DQI Bureau
New Update

The steel

vertical demands completely a different set of IT infrastructure. Right from

mining the iron ore to a finished product, steel making is a complicated

process. Take for instance Tata Steel, a behemoth in every sense. Tata Steel's

products include hot and cold rolled coils and sheets, galvanized sheets, tubes,

wire rods, construction re-bars, rings and bearings. The company has introduced

brands like Tata Steelium (the world's first branded cold rolled steel), Tata

Shaktee (galvanized corrugated sheets), Tata Tiscon (re-bars), Tata Pipes, Tata

Bearings, Tata Agrico (hand tools and implements) and Tata Wiron (galvanized

wire products).

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Best Practices for 2006
  • Select the ERP that best fits the

    business objectives

  • ERP selected has to support

    leading SCM solutions

  • Integration is the key; hence

    solution adopted has to seamlessly talk with each other

  • Utmost care has to be taken in

    terms of shop floor automation

Steel

is different in the following contexts: there are two distinct supply chains.

The first is an inbound supply chain that takes multiple raw materials in the

form of iron-ore, coke, limestone, and converts into single products (hot

metal). The other outbound converts the single product (hot metal) into various

forms of finished steel products as per the customer requirement. Steel has

therefore the distinct requirement of the 'A' and 'V' types of supply

chain. Moreover the steel making process experiences 'strike rate'. This

adds to the challenge of managing variability in the process and keeping the

promise made to the customer. The lead-time of steel making is high while the

lead-time that the customer expects is rather low.

The

solutions in steel are ERPs; SAP and Oracle are most commonly used. Meanwhile,

companies like Tata Steel use i2 solution for outbound supply chain in many of

its steel plants and integrates with its various modules as well as with the

SAP.

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In

addition to best of breed, custom built solutions are commonly used for

scheduling on the shop floor as well as for integrating the level-2 systems

(process computers) with planning and scheduling systems, often called as

level-3 systems. Also on the horizon is a solution called Broner that is

emerging as a viable option for shop floor scheduling. If we take the case of

Tata Steel, the company over the last few years have embarked on some major

initiatives: most significant being the expansion of SAP to business units that

were not covered before. The company's major business applications run on SAP,

which it started rolling out in 1999 in a phased manner.

IT is

involved at each and every stage of the production process

A

phased deployment also makes sense, as every module of the enterprise wide

solution needs to be fine-tuned and aligned with core processes. If we look at

Tata Steel, the first process it did was the order generation and fulfillment

part. Subsequently, it went ahead with the procurement process and the

associated accounting functionalities. The production planning system for the

steel plant was custom built using the APO module of SAP.

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Consulting Panel

Shreekant Mokashi, CIO,

Tata Steel


Every

vertical has its unique requirements and steel being extremely labor intensive,

poses many challenges to the CIO. The biggest challenge being aligning the IT

with the core processes and numerous sub-process. Hence a CIO needs to adopt

many best practices to create an agile IT set up that meets the unique vertical

demands.

Shrikanth G  



shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in

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