Arcelor Mittal Tailored Blanks (AMTB) is a subdivision of the Arcelor Mittal Group. AMTB manufactures custom built welded parts for the car industry. This is a unique production process that offers many advantages to car manufacturers. These parts are produced in 7 plants spread across Europe. Since each part is custom built, the production planning process in relation with the sales plan is a complex one. The same applies to the reporting of accurate & timely actual results. Historically, these processes used to be performed in what AMTB described as a “systematic spaghetti” of different BI & CPM applications, originating from various vendors, glued together by MS Excel. This constituted not only a huge risk of reporting incorrect figures and taking wrong decisions, resulting from that, but additionally, added a tremendously workload to the Sales, Operations and Finance people involved in these processes.
The first step in remedying this “spaghetti” process, was taken by engaging in a Business Analytics Roadmap together with element61. This roadmap resulted in a recommendation for a completely revised architecture as well as a new technology foundation. The vendors of choice were Microsoft for the DWH and BI components and Tagetik for the Planning & Forecasting components. The project – still ongoing in 2019 – is divided into several phases, out of which most have been realized by the end of 2018. A key element in the architecture and project approach, is that both the BI and CPM components are tightly integrated through a central DWH that is being sourced from different AMTB and Arcelor Mittal systems (an MES, SAP, custom applications, Excel sheets and Tagetik). This allows AMTB management to have an accurate and consistent view of both actuals and targets/budgets, to the lowest level of detail available. Some of the applications in scope are: Operations Reporting, Finance Reporting, Commercial Reporting, P&L budgeting & forecasting, Production Planning. The entire project was run and executed by a team of element61 experts, in very close collaboration with AMTB business and ICT stakeholders; given the broad scope, the elapsed time of the project is 1,5 years.
