A Sterling Reputation
Mill Steel is a premier North American flat-rolled and coated steel supplier, founded in 1959 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with six locations across the United States today. The company’s success has been driven by its long-term status as a preferred supplier of high-quality steel to automakers and their suppliers across North America as well as customers in the appliance, agricultural equipment, homebuilding and office furniture industries.
An Opportunity
To enhance operational practices, Mill Steel applies analytics in their everyday operations to identify root-causes to identify opportunities for improvement. Prior to working with OST, the detailed analysis was impeded by increasing data volumes and inefficiencies of the tools used. Mill Steel had a desire to increase the speed of analysis and gain insights faster and they wanted to leverage a self-service visual analytics tool. It was also important for Mill Steel to find a partner that could create a flexible analytics solution that would fit with current and future ERP solutions for the organization.
Enter OST
Using OST’s proven meta driven Azure Data Factory ingestion framework that lifts data to the Azure cloud, the team in short time designed a scalable EDW and analytics solution in Azure. The solution utilizes Power BI to provide scorecards, data exploration, AI visualizations, and analysis of root-causes for Mill Steel. As designed, the Power BI tool is used to quickly evaluate data to gain powerful business insights.
For Mill Steel, the ability to quickly analyze data for root causes and insights allows them to maintain extensive inventory for just-in-time distribution to minimize a client’s costs.
As a competitive advantage, real-time analytics from current data is valuable across the Mill Steel business. The new solution from OST gives them the access they need to data in a visual and scalable tool so they can analyze, collaborate and solve root-cause issues across the supply chain faster.
