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Global Top 10 Aluminium Company

A previous effort of outsourced manual standardization by a well-known off-shore data cleansing company had not achieved the level of quality desired. Management decided to look at algorithm-aided in-house master data standardization as a better approach.

Key facts:

  • USD 7 Billion Revenue
  • Producing 3 Million tonnes of Alu
  • 7000 Employees on one Site
  • Live with Refresh Desktop and Server
  • 200 000 SKU's in scope
  • ERP systems: SAP ECC6 & HANA

Business Challenge

With more than 30 years of excellence in high-quality aluminium production, the company expects the same high quality standards from its master data. Being the world’s largest single-site aluminium smelter with a captive power station means having close to 100 000 material masters in one SAP plant. The major facilities spread over 500 hectares (six square kilometres) include a one million metric tonne per- annum primary aluminium smelter, a  4000 megawatt power station, a 50 million gallon per day water desalination plant, and a significant shipping port. Some years back the company had implemented SAP and was dealing with the practical challenges of how to leverage the system to achieve its expected benefits. A previous effort of outsourcing the material data cleansing to a well-known off-shore data cleansing company had not achieved the level of quality desired and so the main problem remained:

How best to increase the data quality of the existing materials, especially with consistent commercial and technical short and long descriptions & characteristics?

A detailed RFQ was issued seeking software to bring existing materials to the desired level of quality “once and for all”, as well as get new materials created “right-first-time”. Software vendors from all over the world competed for the work.

The Solution

Refresh Desktop was deployed within one week of purchase with the operations and IT teams participating very actively in the kick-off workshop. Refresh Server was customized to automate & replace the 5 level paper-based approvals process which had previously been in place.

But some of the most outstanding work was done by the local maintenance team using Refresh Desktop to cleanse key material groups such as electric motors. This was done by auto-generating 100% consistent SAP short, long and PO texts. These texts were generated from standardized motor attributes, some of which were mined out of Refresh giving true data excellence.

Key Business Benefits

  • Easy to find, share and purchase all items
  • Reduced working capital, duplicates & obsoletes
  • Reduced off-contract spending, better visibility
  • IT lowest total cost of ownership: fully re-used ERP
  • Continuous improvement in Plant Maintenance
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