Industry
Stainless Steel Manufacturing
Data Governance and Architecture Design
ERP, CRM, MES, L2/L1 systems
Solution and expertise
Technologies and Tools
Oracle Databases, SQL Databases, Microstrategy, Cloud environment
Challenge
A European production group, recognized as one of the top stainless steel producer, owns a number of companies with their own set of software solutions for production management and production operations support.
Due to the business growth and as a result of each company merging, the employed software solutions are inherited from each newly coupled company. The technological stack is unsystematic, legacy software employed to support the mission-critical activity, and business logic automated to support the production management is redundant in some areas. Implemented integrations and data flows are chaotic, for some software the personnel competence is weak. Built DWH encompasses only some portion of the data produced by business-oriented software but not the production management data. Besides the centralized DWH, stand-alone data consolidation was established to enable the operational needs for data analysis.
Enterprise Architecture lacks a clear definition and the establishment of strategies, policies, and rules for maintaining the environment. A knowledge gap arises due to the extensive range of software, including older legacy software. Technologies are being developed without sufficient control, leading to significant security concerns.
Result
Employing the results gathered during the analysis phase our team led by the Solution Architect defined and classified the IT assets of each subsidiary including the cross-companies solutions. As the initial stage for moving forward, information about all deployed solutions was consolidated into the software registry including the specification of its’ components and technologies. IT responsible for each service was identified including involved vendors.
Environments, databases, and existing DWH cross-integrations were investigated in terms of unification, data security implemented, and data gathering established. All identified components and connections were documented within the existing data environment diagram.
As part of the Enterprise Maturity Level improvement, the software registry was classified into 4 main critical groups. For each criticality group technical SLA parameters for software availability were defined. Based on the defined classification additional technical decisions were made to support the required parameters. Environment (clouds and on-prem) technical architecture is designed, and software deployment/maintenance/configuration policies and rules were specified to enable a unified approach for components management including the database layer.
Solution
Development of enterprise architecture, initial policies and rules gave the impetus and clarity for the planning of further improvement of the Enterprise Architecture Maturity Level including the implementation of a corporate data life cycle, development of the data governance standards and policies to ensure data integration, availability, timeliness, quality, and security. Thereby a scope of further activities was defined and estimated, a roadmap for implementation was established for:
IT Service Management (ITSM) processes establishment including the specialized solution deployment for ensuring a clear implementation of processes
Software components adjustment according to specified policies and rules
Enterprise Architecture Components Monitoring establishment and integration with Incident management implementation
Database layer change tracking including version control, reporting, and analysis
Data platform and the unified DWH improvement and data Landscape reorganization including governance policies and standards development