Steel is a commodity that makes it harder for companies in the industry to stand out from the crowd. Because of the similarity of the products, the market is highly sensitive to price fluctuations and usually dominated by the lowest bidder. INAD Industrie Software BV helps steel stockholders to get lean and mean in order to drive down costs and remain competitive.
Using technologies such as barcodes, and its proprietary Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, custom-made for the steel industry, INAD's aim is to digitise entire factories.
The ERP system collects data to track resources and enables the running of smooth, low-cost operations, but a lot of information still needs to be entered manually. Traceability is not only a question of good management practices. There are also legal requirements to match an incoming steel beam with its respective product certificate (CE marking as per relevant ISO standards). It takes on average one full-time employee to input product certificates manually. Process other traditional business documents, such as purchase orders, usually require several full-time staff.
For decades, INAD awaited Electronic Data Interchange technologies (EDI) which could safely facilitate the digital exchange of official documents. When it realised the industry still lacked a solution in 2019, a decision was made to look for answers elsewhere.
As a result, INAD helped set up the EDI4Steel Consortium, which oversees the specifications and the technical architecture for the electronic exchange of business documents. EDI4 Steel is open for membership to all entities operating in the steel sector. INAD itself is the solution provider for EDI4Steel and operates the technical infrastructure using CEF's eDelivery.
Seamless digital exchange of documents
The European Commission’s eDelivery Building Block is a solution for the secure electronic exchange of documents, regardless of content and industry. It is provided free by the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) programme, and it is based on European standards and a thriving user community. With eDelivery, it eliminates manual data input when documents are exchanged in structured, digital (UBL) formats. This is done via an integration between business partners’ ERP systems based on a standardised message exchange protocol called AS4.
A win-win for all
The eDelivery support team from CEF helped EDI4STEEL in designing its solution’s technical architecture by providing training and validation. eDelivery identifies key standards and specifications for the exchange of documents and provides a list of software alternatives, which allowed EDI4STEEL to choose software components that fit its existing technology stack and skills.
The EDI4STEEL consortium received a CEF grant (2019-EU-IA-0005) to support the implementation of eDelivery's infrastructure. Furthermore, eDelivery's readily available services and solutions helped the consortium save a year in technical product development. For EDI4STEEL customers, the benefits are significant. On average, steel stockholders can do without one full-time employee by automating the input of product certificates alone.
By extending automation to other document types, manual labour costs can be further reduced by up to € 60,000 per year. Computer-to-computer document exchange is also faster and less prone to mistakes than when conducted by humans. In the end, the increased efficiency has a positive effect on competitiveness through lower costs and higher profits.
The illustration below shows how digital message exchange with eDelivery increases efficiency by eliminating manual data input to revolutionise document exchange.
Solution architecture
Before eDelivery could exchange documents, the content of the documents had to be defined. To do so, EDI4STEEL engaged TNO, a Dutch R&D organisation, to standardise the structure of purchase orders, dispatch advice and product certificates in a way that supports the steel industry, while still conforming with the documents respective generic UBL standards.
eDelivery provides a list of AS4 conformant software alternatives for the Access Point (AP), which makes it easy to integrate ERP systems using the AS4 message exchange protocol. For the AP, EDI4STEEL chose EESSI AS4. NET, because it matched well with INAD’s existing skills in Microsoft technologies. EDI4STEEL also adopted the Commission-provided software for the Service Metadata Publisher (SMP) and the Service Metadata Locator (SML). Together, both software-enabled Access Points discover the IP addresses of destination Access Points.
From pilots to production
At the end of June 2020, EDI4Steel accomplished two pilot projects in Luxembourg with real data using INAD's help and eDelivery's infrastructure.
INAD is currently active in Benelux countries, but EDI4 Steel has the potential to open doors, many more doors in other markets all across Europe and beyond.
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