BlueScope's Australian coated and industrial products business is moving into new phases of a long-running enterprise resource planning (ERP) replacement project.
The modernisation project, running since 2016, is setting the business on a new ERP foundation, comprising Microsoft Dynamics 365 (D365) and the Crowe Metals Accelerator, which is used by metals businesses to set up and configure D365.
BlueScope said in a statement that it uses over 300 applications to support its coated and industrial products business.
"Many of these systems are point-to-point connected, with black and white screens, making it very difficult for our employees to use and for our IT teams to maintain and untangle, let alone consider any enhancements," BlueScope Australia’s Steel Product IT department head of strategy and transformation Jagdeep Singh said.
“Key business processes such as accurate pricing, easy quoting and timely, consistent information about orders and deliveries are not efficiently met by our legacy systems."
So far, BlueScope has implemented the SteelConnect self-service online portal – based on Microsoft Power Platform, and surfacing data from the ERP – to expand customers’ access to information.
“Our customers can now get more detail themselves about their account via the customer portal," Singh said.
"[In addition], employees no longer have to dive into multiple systems – many of them built last century – to complete business processes or even answer simple customer queries."
In the next phase of the project, BlueScope intends to remove "a key legacy system that is used extensively across all of our state service centres in Australia."
"We have also begun a separate project at one of our downstream businesses," Singh said.
Once all phases are completed, the number of employees using BlueScope's ERP platform will almost double, from 300 currently up to 550.
In addition, Singh said the business will be better "positioned to integrate new and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, advanced and predictive analytics, and backoffice robotics to automate manual processes currently performed by employees."
BlueScope has a long-standing rollout of Microsoft platforms across its business.
In 2020, it completed a data and analytics overhaul in which it moved 800 models to the cloud, using Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Databricks.
