Becoming first in the world is a statement of strength in any case, but Tibnor was primarily looking for SAP Datasphere to get a better intermediate data warehouse. Now they got significantly more.
”Exactly, SAP was ahead of the curve by packaging the Business Data Cloud just a few months ago. It is designed to support us users in an even better way and now we will evaluate everything else that is included,” comments Dag Åselius.
Modern cloud system to attract younger employees
The background is that Tibnor is a leading supplier of steel and metals in the Nordic and Baltic regions. The company has around 1,100 employees and is a subsidiary of SSAB. The headquarters are located in Solna and the company also has operations in Finland, Denmark, Norway, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
In the summer of 2022, the SAP S/4HANA private cloud business system was launched. Tibnor was also one of the first customers for the SAP RISE concept in the Nordics and managed to implement the project in less than six months together with its SAP partner Pearl. SAP RISE is a comprehensive Business Transformation-as-a-Service solution (BTaaS), which enables organizations to migrate seamlessly to SAP’s cloud ecosystem.
Furthermore, it can be noted that Tibnor uses S/4HANA as the primary source of its business data. In Finland, it also has an extensive production with two systems for production planning, which are outside the usual systems – but now all data will be able to be merged. SAP S/4HANA is the German software developer’s ERP solution, which can be used both locally installed and in the cloud.
An important point is that the system unifies business processes and analyzes data in real time using machine learning. Customers typically use SAP S/4HANA to unify and monitor complex business processes as they increasingly handle large amounts of data. In general, SAP platforms are developed to provide access to a ”source of truth” across divisions and different data sources. Everything, from sales and finance to manufacturing and human resources management, should therefore be able to be managed under a single database and operating system. In this, of course, technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) fulfill a number of purposes that end up in SAP S/4HANA’s capacity to analyze large amounts of data and automate routine business tasks.
“Good reasons to go for it” to a cloud solution”
The press material about Tibnor’s initiative states, in relation to the above background, that, “there were several reasons for Tibnor to move to the cloud and modernize its IT environment – not least to attract new employees and get a technical platform that can be passed on to the next generation.”
At the same time as the new business system was put in place, SAP Analytics Cloud was also launched. This includes ready-made apps for data analysis and planning that can be used throughout the company. The goal is to gradually replace all old tools and now, for example, replace the older analysis tool for business intelligence (BI), which has been used since 2003.
With SAP’s new AI-based tool, users can now search and analyze data on their own.
Better forecasts and pricing with AI
“We have a vision to combine all old and new business data in one application and use an AI engine for our pricing. These are complex matters because the customers are in many different segments such as construction, engineering and process industry,” says Dag Åselius.
According to him, purchasing steel should be classified as an art form. There are different “recipes” on the market and the producers have their own production cycles to take into account. And on the buyer side, it can therefore be full steam ahead when prices go up or down. All in all, a complex sequence to manage.
But with the help of AI, Tibnor’s senior advisor believes that the company will be able to streamline purchasing, optimize pricing and improve inventory management by discovering patterns and trends that would otherwise have been difficult to predict. Not just knowing what you currently have in stock and what it has looked like historically.
“Before the summer, we are planning an initial pilot. It will be a simplified BI model to learn the new technology, where we will start with logistics, production and sales, among other things. After that, we plan to bring in external data sources,” concludes Dag Åselius.
