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Business leader in metals

Many business leaders compare running a metals company to running a country of rival city states. With most plant managers defending their own interests, getting corporate visibility and control is a tough challenge. Along with the urge to manage their global supply chains as one, decision makers need to push overall agility while becoming more profitable and sustainable along the way. Find out how OMP for Metals, building on Unison Planning™, can help you rise to the occasion.

Looking for: Manage multiple plants as one | High responsiveness | Getting green and circular

Manage multiple plants as one

Insiders argue that the metals industry is as competitive on the inside as it is on the outside. And that’s a pity. Even if some plants manage to run at full capacity, the company as a whole most likely pays the price through mismatches in global capacity utilization and investments, or suboptimal crossflow production decisions.

End-to-end visibility for harmonized decision-making

Business leaders look for planning tools to help them manage all their plants as one. OMP for Metals builds on Unison Planning™’s ‘one logic, one model’ principle, offering end-to-end visibility from the corporate to the detailed plant level.

Advanced intelligence, real-time planning data, and a telescopic digital twin inform centralized decision-making based on well-balanced choices and mathematical methodology. This makes it easier to align and collaborate over multiple interconnected planning entities, layers, and horizons, as well as orchestrate key processes. These include forecasting, sales, and operations planning, campaign planning, order promising, detailed order planning, and scheduling in all their interdependencies.

Science at the service of business

OMP for Metals uses AI, ML, solvers, and data science to provide an objective stimulus for investment decisions, merger option evaluations, and to develop optimal produce or source scenarios. Its ability to balance complex and conflicting KPIs, all at once, supports both strategic and financial optimization, providing reliable information and advanced insights on margins, cash, and costs, and offers priceless support for sales precalculation and production postcalculation.

High responsiveness despite uncertainty and complexity

Uncertainty is the only certainty within the metals industry. Decision-makers simply have to deal with volatile markets, large numbers of small – yet very specific – orders, erratic price fluctuations, complex operations, and highly variable production processes, subject to unforeseeable quality issues and machine downtimes.

Struggle or thrive

While many business leaders struggle to respond to sudden market and supply changes, most are eager to become more demand-driven — provided that doesn’t entail excess intermediate stock building up in between production steps and jeopardizing margins.

High responsiveness despite uncertainty and complexity

In a line of business where most players merely focus on managing backlog, true captains of industry commit to reducing delivery times. But, given the typical length of production chains, this mind switch towards individual orders with short run times is not easy.

More agile with Unison Planning™

OMP for Metals uses Unison Planning™ as a unique solution empowering business leaders to make sense of volatile markets and supply disruptions. The telescopic digital twin links all the planning horizons and layers. As a result, tactical and operational planning remain perfectly aligned at any given time.

Flawless data management and integration features use real-time data to inform reality-based planning. When a ten-minute discrepancy between production steps can potentially push back an order for weeks, this live connection between planning and factory floor is absolutely essential.

Built-in AI, ML, and solvers allow for dynamically generated bills of materials and routing plans, covering successive production stages across multiple interconnected plants — including those operated by subcontractors — as well as materials-based or order attribute-based allocation. At the same time, the embedded intelligence puts you firmly in control of processing costs, the optimal mix of raw materials and scrap and, indeed, the entire production process, all while yielding higher margins.

Getting green and circular

Environmental concerns are gradually becoming top of mind in the metals industry. With carbon taxes going up and customers progressively passing on responsibility for environmental footprint regulations and CO₂ emissions to suppliers, metals manufacturers are forced to step it up. The instability of natural gas supply, combined with geopolitical turmoil and unpredictable price fluctuations, drive up the pressure. So how should we react?

Invest wisely for later, start planning smarter now

Smart decision makers are already stepping up initiatives to phase out blast furnaces in favor of electric arc furnaces, pending a technological breakthrough in hydrogen as an alternative fuel. Promising as this sounds, such investments only affect the baseline in the long run. Luckily, we can still push forward, by planning smarter today.

Shrinking carbon footprint with Unison Planning™

OMP for Metals relies on Unison Planning™‘s advanced logic and scientific backbone to realize immediate cuts in carbon footprint by up to a staggering 20 %. Smarter campaign planning allows more continuous flow planning. With less material cooling mid-process, major savings in both energy and emissions are possible. As a bonus, advanced solvers and material allocators optimize yield ratios and raw material mixes while cutting down on scrap and economizing on scarce resources and energies.

Planning, simulation, and CO₂ reporting

OMP for Metals brings even greater benefits. It allows decision makers to integrate CO₂ as one of the key parameters in the overall value-optimization exercise, and simultaneously find an optimal balance over multiple KPIs. It also produces reliable reports on both historic and future emissions, useful when preparing CO₂ audits or forward projections required to backup BTA (best available technology) claims when filing (free or paid) emission certificates.

What our customers say

“They convinced us to work with them because we felt that they understood our business.”

Erwin Bussi, Supply Chain Manager at Industeel

“We implemented OMP's solution for forecasting and inventory management. Our goal was to reach lower stocks while maintaining the same service level for our customers. We already see the first benefits. Forecast accuracy has improved. We need fewer change-overs, we produce fewer rush orders and have fewer stock ruptures. Our planning and production have improved a lot.”

Heidi Behiels, Group Planning Manager at Betafence

“OMP supported us in our approach of to meet quality instead of due date – happiness on the due date is over the day after, but benefits from quality remain forever.”

Augusto Lara, CEO Villares Metals

“Supply chain performance analysis allows us to continuously implement further improvements.”

Marcell Sehner, Senior Vice-President of Digital Transformation and Services at VDM Metals

“For the first time, we could identify where inventory in production would rise unintentionally due to an imbalance between order backlog and plant performance. We could also predict which machines might encounter material shortages. OMP's solution provides a transparent view giving planners the opportunity to test and evaluate alternatives. This is how we managed to cut overall lead times and reduce our work-in-process.”

Michael Schickentanz, Head of Operations Planning & Master Data Management at VDM Metals

Business leader in metals

Manage multiple plants as one