重工业的灵活性:塔塔钢铁欧洲分享它的S&OP故事

All companies plan, but not all companies plan well. In an unforgiving global economy, manufacturers can’t afford to overlook any way to maximize profits. They have to squeeze every bit of inefficiency out of their operations, boost customer satisfaction to encourage repeat buying and find new markets for high-margin specialty products (often at short notice).

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The key to one company’s success? Anaplan’s connected planning platform which orchestrates demand forecasting, just-in-time deal-making, manufacturing, logistics, and financial planning into a data-driven, efficient, and agile process.

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The mandate: Create value at every step

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Tata Steel (a subsidiary of India-based Tata Group) is one of Europe’s leading steel producers, with two of its major steel mills in Port Talbot, UK, and the third in IJmuiden, the Netherlands. It also has offices throughout Europe and North America. Tata makes specialized steel products – sheets, coils, and tubes that can be configured in dozens of thicknesses, tensile strengths, and finishes, for everything from food cans to auto parts to laser-cut, precisely configured industrial components. It produces about 10 million metric tons of steel a year, bringing about €7.1 billion in annual revenue.

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Capital and operating expenses, including raw materials, labor, state-of-the-art mills, and shipping, are high in the steel industry – so profit margins are slim. “The business mandate is always in front of us, so we know everything we do must create value,” says Dr. Svend Lassen, head of reporting and data analytics for sales, marketing, and supply chain at Tata Steel.

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Lassen knew digital transformation could make a solid contribution to the profitability mandate. So he set up a new function, reporting and analytics, in the mid-2010s. This team supports business decision-making with analytics, dashboards tracking key performance indicators, and business planning solutions. More generally, his team also helped the company create consistent data governance policies and make the insights from this new generation of digital tools more broadly accessible.

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The challenge: Get better insight into the supply chain

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The biggest challenge facing Lassen’s new reporting and analytics team was that customer surveys were revealing dissatisfaction – not with product quality or price, but how quickly and reliably they were getting their orders filled.

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“We had long lead times for configuration, and it was hard to predict when orders would come out of production,” he says. “And because we didn’t have much transparency into where the steel was, we also weren’t fully utilizing any free production capacity for new orders.”

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The company needed to boost supply chain efficiency (and therefore profitability) by getting better insight into real-time steel production. Tata Steel’s production lines often had downtime between fulfilling existing requests that could be used on new projects.

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The problem was not just to figure out when production resources were available but also to share that information with the sales reps, who could reach out to prospective customers with “flash sale” offers. But this business model could only work if the reps had reliable, real-time updates and the company’s planners could quickly calculate if a potential deal would be profitable.

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And the information needed to flow in all directions, connecting finance, procurement, manufacturing, logistics, and sales. “From our perspective, when we talk about sales and operations planning, or S&OP, we don’t see it only as supply chain, but indeed as business planning,” Lassen says.

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The plan: Balance demand and supply

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Lassen and his analytics team launched a long-term digital transformation program called Future Value Chain, coordinating all the efforts to improve profitability from demand and supply perspectives. They adopted the Anaplan Connected Planning platform because it enables planning and forecasting across multiple departments and business processes.

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They built planning solutions for three main steps in the value chain:

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1. Demand forecasting. Tata Steel can now work collaboratively with customers to anticipate demand for specific products in each country where it does business, up to three years ahead. The Anaplan platform applies machine learning to historical data to create demand forecasts that are much more accurate than Tata’s previous stand-alone forecasting tool.
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2. Sales and operations planning (S&OP). In this step, Tata balances projected steel demand against what it can supply from its various mills. And now that the Anaplan platform makes it easier to identify both overall demand and production capacity at any given time, the company can prioritize the most profitable and/or strategic orders (say, from faithful customers who can be counted on for repeat business).
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3. The newest addition, a Risk and Operations tool, lets the company spot gaps on its production schedule where it can slot in new orders at short notice. It gives sales reps the ability to negotiate commitments with prospective customers in real time, thanks to a handy mobile version.
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The result: Less downtime, more sales with connected planning

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So far, the Future Value Chain initiative has helped Tata Steel:

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• Shrink order backlogs substantially, which improves customer satisfaction.
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• Reduce the amount of raw steel stock waiting to be configured into sellable products by 20 percent (a drop of about 400 million kilos) and reduce waste, freeing up cash flow for other purposes.
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• Improve competitive differentiation by opening up more slots to make specially configured orders.
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• Increase income by more than €10 million a year, or 5-10 percent of the company’s yearly gross revenue.
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On top of those balance-sheet benefits, in 2019, the World Economic Forum named Tata Steel’s Netherlands plant one of its “Manufacturing Lighthouses,” a global network of factories that are models for using cutting-edge industrial technologies. “We were very proud to be on that list of ‘factories of the future,’ as a steel producer,” Lassen says.

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What’s more, the Anaplan S&OP platform has helped Tata Steel ride out the economic shocks of 2020. When COVID hit, the company didn’t have to adopt new forecasting techniques – just build scenarios for various types of downturns (long or short, deep or shallow), then monitor actual demand closely in Anaplan’s dashboards, to see which scenario seemed like the best match and adjust the long-range plan accordingly.

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“All that uncertainty also meant making more frequent planning updates than we used to,” even week to week, Lassen comments. “That was one more way it helped to have such good linkage between demand forecasts and other areas of production, such as maintenance and finance. And we were able to build in external market indicators such as car sales and aggregate demand for steel, to get even more forward perspective.”

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Lessons learned: Democratizing data pays off

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For Tata Steel, transformation meant not just adopting new applications, but learning to work differently – with more cross-departmental alignment, and making data-driven insights more broadly accessible. “That was quite a significant journey,” Lassen reflects.

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For example, the stakeholders had to balance the competing interests of maintaining centralized control over planning data, for the sake of security, versus sharing it more widely, Lassen recalls. “Tata Steel stakeholders ultimately saw the benefits of data democratization, using analytic tools and dashboards to derive actionable insights that create business value. It’s been really transformative. And Anaplan has been with us the whole way.”

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To learn more about how Tata Steel Europe is using the Anaplan platform to align strategy with execution and increase revenue, plus behind-the-scenes views of implementation (such as the organizational challenges of moving a large company to an agile development model), watch the on-demand webinar The growth driver — S&OP as the ultimate engine aligning business plans.

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所有的公司都有计划，但并不是所有的公司都计划得很好。在无情的全球经济中，制造商不能忽视任何实现利润最大化的方法。他们必须从运营中剔除任何一点低效，提高客户满意度以鼓励重复购买，并为高利润的专业产品(通常是在短时间内)找到新市场。

一家公司成功的关键是什么?Anaplan的连接计划该平台将需求预测、即时交易、制造、物流和财务规划整合为数据驱动、高效和敏捷的流程。

使命:每一步都要创造价值

塔塔钢铁(印度塔塔集团的子公司)是欧洲领先的钢铁生产商之一，其两家主要钢铁厂位于英国的塔尔伯特港，第三家位于荷兰的IJmuiden。它还在欧洲和北美设有办事处。塔塔制造专门的钢铁产品-薄板，线圈和管，可以配置几十种厚度，抗拉强度和表面处理，从食品罐头到汽车零部件到激光切割，精确配置的工业部件。该公司每年生产约1,000万吨钢材，年收入约71亿欧元。

钢铁行业的资本和运营费用(包括原材料、劳动力、最先进的工厂和运输)很高，因此利润率很低。塔塔钢铁销售、营销和供应链报告和数据分析主管send Lassen博士说:“商业使命一直在我们面前，所以我们知道我们所做的一切都必须创造价值。”

拉森知道，数字化转型可以为盈利能力做出坚实的贡献。因此，他在2010年代中期设立了一个新功能——报告和分析。该团队通过分析、跟踪关键性能指标的仪表板和业务规划解决方案来支持业务决策。亚搏彩票app官方网站更广泛地说，他的团队还帮助公司创建了一致的数据治理政策，并使新一代数字工具的见解更广泛地获得。

挑战是:更好地了解供应链

拉森的新报告和分析团队面临的最大挑战是，客户调查显示出的不满不是对产品质量或价格的不满，而是对他们完成订单的速度和可靠性的不满。

他表示:“我们需要很长时间才能进行配置，而且很难预测订单何时会停产。”“而且，由于我们对钢材在哪里没有太多的透明度，我们也没有充分利用任何空闲产能来完成新订单。”

该公司需要通过更好地实时了解钢铁生产来提高供应链效率(从而提高盈利能力)。塔塔钢铁(Tata Steel)的生产线经常在满足现有需求之间有停工时间，而这些需求可以用于新项目。

问题不仅在于找出生产资源何时可用，还在于与销售代表分享这些信息，销售代表可以通过“限时抢购”优惠来接触潜在客户。但这种商业模式只有在销售代表掌握可靠的实时信息，公司的规划者能够迅速计算出一笔潜在交易是否有利可图的情况下才能奏效。

信息需要在各个方向流动，连接财务、采购、制造、物流和销售。拉森说:“从我们的角度来看，当我们谈论销售和运营计划(S&OP)时，我们不仅仅将其视为供应链，而是作为业务计划。”

计划:平衡需求和供应

拉森和他的分析团队启动了一项名为“未来价值链”的长期数字化转型计划，从需求和供应的角度协调所有努力，以提高盈利能力。他们采用了Anaplan Connected Planning平台，因为它能够跨多个部门和业务流程进行规划和预测。

他们为价值链中的三个主要步骤构建了规划解亚搏彩票app官方网站决方案:

1. 需求预测。塔塔钢铁现在可以与客户合作，预测其业务开展的每个国家对特定产品的需求，最长可预测三年。适用于Anaplan平台机器学习结合历史数据，建立比塔塔之前的独立预测工具更准确的需求预测。
2. 销售和运营计划(S&OP)。在这一步骤中，塔塔将平衡预计的钢铁需求与各钢厂的供应量。现在，anplan平台可以更容易地在任何给定的时间确定总体需求和生产能力，公司可以优先考虑最有利可图和/或最具战略意义的订单(比如，来自可以依赖的忠实客户，他们可以成为回头客)。
3. 最新加入的a风险及操作工具，让公司发现其生产计划的空白，它可以在短时间内插入新订单。它使销售代表能够与潜在客户实时谈判承诺，这要归功于一种技术便捷的手机版。

结果是:更少的停机时间，更多的销售与相关的计划

到目前为止，未来价值链计划已经帮助塔塔钢铁:

• 大幅减少订单积压，提高客户满意度。
• 将等待配置为可销售产品的原钢库存减少20%(减少约4亿公斤)，并减少浪费，释放现金流用于其他用途。
• 通过开放更多的槽位来进行特殊配置的订单，提高竞争差异化。
• 每年增加超过1000万欧元的收入，或公司年总收入的5- 10%。

除了这些资产负债表上的好处之外，2019年，世界经济论坛将塔塔钢铁的荷兰工厂评为其“最具竞争力”的工厂之一。制造业的灯塔,这是一个全球工厂网络，是使用尖端工业技术的典范。拉森说:“作为一家钢铁生产商，我们很自豪能被列入‘未来工厂’的名单。”

更重要的是，Anaplan S&OP平台帮助塔塔钢铁度过了2020年的经济冲击。当新冠肺炎来临时，该公司不需要采用新的预测技术——只需要为各种类型的衰退(长或短，深或浅)构建情景，然后在Anaplan的仪表板上密切监控实际需求，看看哪种情景似乎是最佳匹配，并相应地调整长期计划。

Lassen评论道:“所有这些不确定性也意味着我们要比过去更频繁地更新计划。”“这是在需求预测与维护和财务等其他生产领域之间建立良好联系的另一种方式。而且，我们能够把汽车销量和钢铁总需求等外部市场指标纳入考虑范围，从而获得更加前瞻性的观点。”

经验教训:数据民主化是有回报的

对塔塔钢铁来说，转型不仅意味着采用新的应用程序，还意味着学习以不同的方式工作——更多的跨部门协作，并使数据驱动的见解更广泛地获得。拉森回忆道:“这是一次意义重大的旅程。

Lassen回忆说，例如，为了安全起见，利益相关者必须平衡对规划数据保持集中控制的竞争利益，与更广泛地共享数据。“塔塔钢铁的利益相关者最终看到了数据民主化的好处，使用分析工具和仪表板得出可操作的见解，创造了商业价值。这真的是变革性的。阿纳潘一直陪伴着我们。”

要了解更多关于塔塔钢铁欧洲公司如何使用Anaplan平台将战略与执行结合起来并增加收入，以及实施的幕后观点(例如将一个大公司转移到敏捷开发模型的组织挑战)，请观看按需网络研讨会增长动力-标准与操作系统作为调整商业计划的最终引擎。