Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Metals service centers: firms that cut, level, shape, form and warehouse and sell aluminum, brass, copper and steel for manufacturers that they source from producers and traders are the unglamorous but broad-shouldered and hardworking middlepeople in the industrial supply chain.

 

Service centers' operations are hidden behind sheet metal, concrete and brick in the less travelled parts of the cities and towns. Their processing lacks the drama of fiery, molten metal being poured from ladles or tapped from furnaces into casters or ingots, sparks flying into the darkness. Instead theirs is the clunk and hiss of machinery that takes coils and bars that arrive on their loading dock into shapes that can be turned into practical finished goods.

 

Does this mean that service centers are industrial-age too when it comes to buying, selling, procuring and shipping? Quite the opposite. They are some of the sharpest most and literally cutting edge companies there are, because as middlepeople they have to be. These outfits-and I know from having covered the metals industry-invented 'CRM' i.e. methodologies that assess customers' total value in pricing and fulfillment.

 

Macsteel Holdings is one of world's largest private metals service centers, and international metals trading and shipping companies. And it has modernized its technology foundation and improved its operations in North America by implementing the Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 at Macsteel Service Centers USA.

 

Macsteel previously used a legacy system to track orders and manage financial data. However, this system was not sufficiently scalable and could not provide the management information or insight necessary to make effective business decisions in the highly-competitive, commodity steel market.

 

By replacing its legacy system and standardizing on the latest version of the Oracle E-Business Suite, Macsteel now has a holistic view into its rapidly growing sales and procurement operations. It can keep a pulse on internal and external business trends surrounding orders, inventory, pricing and lead times to improve margins, reduce waste and strengthen its competitive edge.

 

In 2009, Macsteel made a strategic decision to standardize its IT department and systems on the Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1. The organization began implementing Oracle in May and went live with five of its 30 branches and 100 users in December.

 

To meet the specialized needs of the metals service center industry, Macsteel leveraged Oracle Business Accelerators to tie its business requirements to the software using process maps. It also created software extensions to complement the system without changing the core technology, allowing the organization to easily upgrade and benefit from the latest versions of Oracle software.

 

During Macsteel's IT revamp, the company deployed applications including financial management, inventory optimization, advanced supply chain planning and Oracle Transportation Management, which have greatly added value to the Macsteel business process.

 

With financial visibility into its extended supply chain costs, Macsteel can accurately analyze information such as transportation and acquisition costs with Oracle Landed Cost Management to improve financial processes and decision making. By using the new converged inventory system, Macsteel has merged process manufacturing with discrete manufacturing inventory into one shared application, delivering a detailed view of overall inventory costs.

 

Running the Oracle E-Business Suite helps Macsteel track and manage important compliance data for audit purposes, including security hierarchies, raw material pedigree and purchase authorization, and ensures that it retains genealogy and traceability data on its assets. Relying on Oracle Transportation Management, it benefits from improved planning of shipments and load consolidation while validating freight billing against expected shipment costs.

 

Macsteel is not finished yet with its Oracle E-Business deployment. It next plans to implement Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition to automate its data collection and analysis process.

 

"As a leader in the highly dynamic global steel market, our success is contingent on the ability to make educated and fast decisions based on rapidly changing market conditions," said Stuart Patsos, vice president of IT, Macsteel Service Centers USA. 'Having real-time insight from sales and procurement data enables us to understand and gauge changes in our supply and demand, as well as the trends in the overall marketplace. With the Oracle E-Business Suite, we benefit from a flexible solution that provides the visibility to efficiently optimize our inventory, reduce waste and increase profitability: now and in the future."