Tata Steel Taps Information Builders to Forge Stronger Reporting System
WebFOCUS and iWay Help Steel Producer Improve Analysis and Response Times
Tata Steel, one of the world’s leading steel producers, knows the importance of having iron-clad business systems. The company has embarked on a mission to close the competitive gap by being more cohesive and fostering an environment of continuous improvement. This ethos clearly extends to IT and is why Tata Steel uses the Information Builders WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform.
Galvanizing Success
Tata Steel supplies many of the most dynamic markets around the world, including building and construction, automotive, aerospace, packaging, railways, and engineering. The IT department is organized into various groups that support multiple business units and thousands of users. One of these is the Business Systems unit, which focuses primarily on end-user computing and data warehousing for Tata Steel Strip Products UK, Tata Steel Packaging, Tata Steel Colors, and Tata Steel Tubes, otherwise known as the strip division. "Each business unit has different systems and different reporting requirements," says Anthony Batts, a senior business analyst. "There were many reporting tools being used and very little standardization."
Following a strategic directive from Tata Steel CIO Bruno Laquet, representatives from the hubs investigated a number of leading tools in choosing an enterprise reporting product that could be rolled out to the entire organization. At a minimum, the solution had to be web-based, with the ability to report easily against SAP Business Warehouse and Oracle data sources. After an exhaustive search, including functionality reviews and vendor presentations, the committee chose WebFOCUS, a solution that was already in use at a number of business units.
A Computing Evolution
Tata Steel and Information Builders have enjoyed a long, productive relationship that began with the implementation of Mainframe FOCUS in the late 1980s. FOCUS Desktop reporting solutions provided users with powerful functionality in a client-server environment. This greatly reduced mainframe computing costs, giving Tata Steel’s power users more impact on the front end and easy access to a multitude of data on the back end. Then came WebFOCUS and with it the opportunity to centralize reporting via an intranet, making it easier for all users to develop and distribute reports. Tata Steel now intends for the majority of employees to build and deploy reports on the Web. "Using the browser in a server-based reporting environment is so much easier for everyone," says Batts. "Plus we don’t have to worry about version control and software upgrades for each department. It is now centralized."
Coordinating all the data from the various legacy systems and platforms could have been daunting. However, iWay Software, an Information Builders division, provided a flexible data architecture that satisfied the company’s information requirements. Using iWay DataMigrator, Tata Steel creates data warehouses to assemble information and support reporting and analysis applications. DataMigrator uses iWay’s award-winning adapters for seamless access to and migration of virtually any enterprise data. Its easy-to-use interface enables fast, flexible, end-to-end extract, transform, and load (ETL) process creation involving Tata Steel’s multiple data structures across disparate computing platforms. Because the DataMigrator integration engine provides complete data structure transparency, different data sources appear as a set of relational tables, so cross-platform, multiple-database extractions and joins are just a mouse-click away. The latest company-wide strategic directive is SAP migration – another step toward organizational cohesiveness and one that WebFOCUS is well-positioned to complement in terms of reporting against SAP Business Warehouse.
Iron-Clad Business Intelligence
For any manufacturing process in the highly competitive steel industry, factory managers are challenged to keep yields as high as possible. At Tata Steel, raw data is collected during each step on the plant floor, primarily from process control systems. There may be hundreds of variables for each piece of material. For example, the materials’ composition changes at every stage of the process due to fluctuations in levels of carbon and silicon. iWay DataMigrator transfers this mass of data into huge Oracle data warehouses on an Intel server. WebFOCUS is then used to extract process-control data for through-process analysis, which helps Tata Steel find the root cause of any defects in the material and understand any variations in yields.
"Before WebFOCUS, it took around two weeks to gather data and manually analyze the production of one coil," recalls Batts. Now Quality Assurance staff can see the lifecycle of each coil by looking at the WebFOCUS report that’s automatically generated and distributed using WebFOCUS ReportCaster. This assists in understanding why processes run well or go wrong and what changes, if any, need to be made. In addition, the quality-control system maximizes the value of each coil because there are fewer defects in the end product. "When you consider that Tata Steel Strip Products produces about 150,000 steel coils per year each weighing in at 15 to 25 tons, there is potential for massive savings," Batts says.
Tata Steel Packaging Plus, another business unit, also uses WebFOCUS to perform end-to-end analysis on data in the warehouse, monitoring the entire production history of a piece of steel from raw material to the finished article, whether it is a soft drink can or light reflector. The powerful system has enabled Packaging Plus to significantly reduce costs by identifying and correcting production problems.
Achieving Manufacturing in Tata Steel Strip Products
Before a steel coil reaches the end of the line, it passes through several different production processes. Tracking of orders and stock levels in a process where there may be several weeks between receipt of an order and delivery of the finished product can be a complex management task.
"For any one of our customers, we may have several hundred orders either on our books or in process at any one time," says Allan Hodgson, Senior Business Analyst at Tata Steel Strip Products. "In addition, our own manufacturing and warehouse facilities are spread across several locations and many of our customers, who depend on the information provided by the systems, are spread across the UK and beyond."
Using WebFOCUS, order progress applications were developed to pull together data from all the systems, enabling account managers – and customers – to be informed of every aspect of an order at every stage of the manufacturing process. This enables account managers to pinpoint a product at each stage in the production process and determine exactly when the end product will be delivered.
Data Warehouse ROI
Tata Steel Strip Products UK has at least 15 data warehouses for different purposes. Some are shared by everyone within commercial headquarters; others are very specific to departments that need data organized in a particular way. "The data warehouse we built for Packaging Plus’ through-process analysis cost approximately 70,000 pounds and paid for itself in three months," says Batts. "We never had the capability to deliver the reports required by the project until we built that warehouse."
Business units are encouraged to build more data warehouses to analyse different aspects of data within the business, but each new data warehouse – and any new IT project – has to cost-justify itself before it gets the green light. Tata Steel works with its outsourcing partner Capgemini to design and build data warehouses. Source systems are updated in the plants, which all use different databases because historically they were different companies with different systems. iWay adapters and DataMigrator are used to access and transfer data from the mainframe and three other platforms into an Oracle data warehouse.
Some data warehouses are updated every hour, some overnight. Currently, Tata Steel runs about 200 DataMigrator jobs per night. "Jobs that used to take an hour are now taking five minutes so we can fit a lot more into an overnight schedule," says Batts. This is important on a shift-based work pattern. "When a new shift arrives at 7:00 am, everyone wants reports – they want to know the performance from the last shift and look to improve it."
WebFOCUS reports are run against the Oracle data warehouse to produce the information and graphs needed for the vast majority of Account Team and customer enquiries. To make things even easier, Tata Steel has linked DataMigrator to WebFOCUS ReportCaster, which means as soon as fresh data comes in reports are kicked off.
Integrate With SAP? No Problem
As part of a big IT initiative to standardize reporting environments, reduce integration points, and enable more cooperation between business units, Tata Steel has begun migrating finance, procurement, and HR systems to SAP. Over time, more functions will also move to SAP. The company expects this strategic restructuring to deliver big business benefits by integrating systems that are now disparate, reducing overall IT spending and sharpening its competitive edge.
"The process data in the mills is not going away," says Batts. "One of the key reasons we chose Information Builders WebFOCUS backed with iWay’s integration capabilities is because it enables us to easily pull data out of many data sources and join it with other data in the data warehouse. It’s very simple – SAP could be just another data source to report from."
Tata Steel is considering another Information Builders product, the iWay SAP Adapter, that "listens" for SAP outputs and "pushes" requests out automatically. This presents an opportunity for time- and event-driven data warehouses, which Tata Steel believes could be an opportunity going forward.
Users Have the Power
Tata Steel does not believe in a restrictive reporting environment. It feels strongly that people who know the data use the data because they can take the most value out of the information. From day one, users were trained so they could simply and quickly create the needed reports. This philosophy holds true today. "WebFOCUS definitely makes it easier for people to do their jobs," Batts says. "Instead of calling on IT resources, users have the tools they need to build precisely the reports they need."
Power users in each business unit or department coordinate, develop, and deploy reports using WebFOCUS. Since the overall user environment is open, power users are also responsible for making sure that reports are not queued on ReportCaster before they have been tested. Tata Steel uses WebFOCUS Resource Analyzer to help them get a clearer picture of what users are doing. "With Resource Analyzer we can see how many reports were run in various environments, how long they take, how much processing power they use," says Batts. "We are not trying to control the way people work, just giving them more information to help them work smarter."