Regional Steel Manufacturer Achieves Considerable Savings, Improves Productivity Through Oracle E-Business Suite
Doha, Qatar, February 5, 2006 - Qatar Steel Company (QASCO), said to be the largest steel manufacturer in the GCC region, has completed the implementation of Oracle's comprehensive business applications solution, Oracle E-Business Suite, as part of the industrial giant's expansion plans. Oracles E-Business Suite has enabled QASCO to streamline its various internal business processes, as well as giving senior management a clearer, more concise means to analyze business performance and make informed and timely business decisions.
Demand for steel has grown rapidly over the last five years, in tandem with the real estate boom in the Gulf. Developing a strategy to capitalize on current and future growth in the region's construction industry, QASCO has developed an aggressive expansion plan, with the steel manufacturer on course to complete in 2010 the building of a state-of-the-art facility capable of producing four million tons of iron per year. Oracles E-Business Suite will allow QASCO the ability to expand while retaining its lean manufacturing structure and high-quality production.
Already an Oracle customer, QASCO sought to strengthen its IT capabilities by replacing systems developed in-house with a world class enterprise resource planning solution from Oracle. According to Malek Hamdieh, Information Technology manager for QASCO, the company required a solution that would provide an integrated view of its growing operations: "We had a set of stand-alone systems developed internally by our IT staff. The systems, while operating independently could not provide an integrated view of our business operations, we wanted our executives to have up to the minute accurate information to enable them to make business critical decisions quickly, Oracle E-Business Suite gave us this capability and much more."
After a thorough evaluation of all the options open to QASCO, the decision was taken to select a single vendor with an integrated solution rather than a range of so-called 'best-of-breed' applications or modules. According to Hamdieh, Oracle E-Business Suite allows QASCO to access up-to-date information in real-time, enabling the organization to respond rapidly to changes in the market. "We were confident that Oracle's fully integrated application suite built on a single source of data would give us a solid foundation upon which we could expand our business and it did," he said.
Oracle E-Business Suite has significantly improved QASCO's core operations by raising visibility across the breadth of the business, and enhancing operational efficiency across its financial, manufacturing, purchasing functions.
With plans in place to increase production capacity, QASCO is turning to Oracle's solution to assist in forecasting demand -- a capability that the company anticipates will enable more effective utilization of capacity. Forecasting is a new challenge for the company as it previously manufactured product to order, and production was typically fully sold two months out.
"Our management team can now quickly and easily conduct comprehensive analysis because they have the information needed at their fingertips. We have trained most users on Oracle Discoverer, which enables them to extract information and shape it to meet their research needs," said Hamdieh. "Expanded reporting and analysis capabilities are benefits of an integrated system that works from a single source of data. Users can look at the data transparently without relying on the IT staff to analyze the information for them."
QASCO has completed the first phase of deployment aimed at streamlining internal processes - financials, human resources, manufacturing, enterprise asset management for maintenance, supply chain, procurement and sales. After that, QASCO implemented an internal knowledge base called the "iCenter" based on Oracle Portal which assisted to automate many of QASCO's buinsess processes and provided much of the existing information to the users in a quick and easy interface. QASCO plans to take the "iCenter" a step further to give its executive team a user-friendly way to access and analyze data. Specifically, it will enable customized views of key performance indicators (KPIs) and explanations of the information in a user-friendly format.
Commenting on the partnership between Oracle and QASCO, Ayman Abouseif, Oracle's Managing Director for the Gulf States, emphasized the flexibility that Oracle E-Business Suite gives to Qatar's steel manufacturer, saying, "Oracle delivers seamless integration between all of QASCO's business functions - a critical objective in achieving visibility into the company's business performance. The technology is now in place to support QASCO's ambitious plans, supported by Oracle and its systems integrator partner, Global Technology Services."
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© Press Release 2006
