Delivering on Your Promises: Implementing a Successful Supply Chain Transformation in the Steel Industry

As steel producers continue to be painfully aware, the volatility of global demand for steel looks set to continue for many years. This unpredictability is driven in large part by emerging economies like China, coupled with increasing global market competition. In light of this, improvements in the way that companies manage their supply chain can act as a key competitive differentiator and unlock value, both in terms of reducing working capital requirements, and creating additional value through exploiting new market opportunities.

Listen to author Andrew Zoryk talk about supply chain transformation in the steel industry.

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Five of the key factors critical to success in enabling and delivering supply chain transformation projects in the steel industry are:

• Business policy and process alignment.
• Business process and software alignment.
• Planning model granularity.
• Organizational alignment.
• Supply chain performance metrics.

By not addressing these areas appropriately, many steel companies have not been successful in achieving the supply chain transformations that they originally set out to do. Such missed opportunities are frequently blamed on the lack of maturity of available software tools for supply chain management and, while this partially may have been the case in the past, it is frequently not the real underlying reason.

Dr. Andrew Zoryk, Managing Director-Resources, is globally responsible for the Accenture Advanced Enterprise Solution for Metals. His experience includes more than 24 years of work with the steel and metals industry in the areas of supply chain management, manufacturing and business operations. Andrew has a PhD in physics from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and is based in Düsseldorf.