Steel Technologies

BUSINESS NEED

Louisville, Kentucky-based Steel Technologies processes the steel that “makes life go.” The company produces flat-rolled steel to specific requirements for customers in a variety of industries, including: Automotive, Appliance, Lawn and garden, Office equipment, Agricultural, Machinery, and Construction. The organization operates 24 facilities throughout the United States, Mexico, and Canada, processing more than 3.1 million tons of steel for more than 1,000 customers.

Steel Technologies supports an extensive base of industry segments throughout North America and plays a critical role in the manufacturing supply chain. With much of its business growth dependent on building long-lasting relationships with its customers, being easy to do business with Steel Technologies is critical to the company’s success. Its burdensome B2B communications technology, however, was disrupting that objective.

KEY PERFORMANCE OUTCOMES

• Failure Rate Reduction: Eliminated a 20% failure rate in file transfers.

• Faster Onboarding: Reduced trading partner onboarding time from 2 months to days.

• Daily Volume: Successfully stabilizes the processing of nearly 2,000 EDI documents per day.

• Scale of Operations: Supports the movement of 3.1 million tons of steel annually across 24 facilities.

• Efficiency: Replaced manual resends and "hard-coding" with automated alerts and a single end-to-end platform.

IT CHALLENGE

Steel Technologies exchanges nearly 2,000 EDI documents a day with customers, suppliers, and vendors over FTP and SFTP. These included:

• Invoices

• Inventory inquiries

• Advance ship notices

• Order status reports

But the communications layer on its PC-based EDI system, which Steel had been using for more than four years, wasn’t very user-friendly. The system lacked adequate monitoring and error handling capabilities, and when transfers failed (which happened about 20 percent of the time), resending those files triggered a host of manual processes.

In fact, Steel Technologies’ Senior Software Engineer Mike Hoben said the data communications piece, which also required substantial customization for any upgrade, was “driving him crazy.”

“Every time we wanted to implement a new FTP connection, we had to modify the program to get it working,” Hoben said. “It was taking two months to onboard a new trading partner because there was so much code to change. It was extremely difficult to manage, and we had no visibility into dropped communications.”

Hoben, who had worked with Cleo technology previously, engaged Cleo about a more advanced communications solution for Steel Technologies.

“I used Cleo in the early 1990s when I first entered into the EDI arena, so I knew the product was proven,” he said. “Cleo was the first communications software I searched for when I needed a new solution.”

BUSINESS NEED

The company sells its business products through myriad direct and indirect brick & mortar and online channels, including “big box” retailers like Best Buy, Office Depot and Staples, as well as through Amazon Marketplace. Home products, like label makers, sewing machines and embroidery systems, are moved through independent dealers and distributors who sell these devices to crafts and retail stores like Walmart, Target, Michaels, Jo-Ann or Hobby Lobby. Over the past five years or so the company has also seen a 6-fold increase in direct sales of its business printers and home sewing solutions via its increasingly popular website portal.

This multifaceted ecosystem of customers and partners, dealers and distributors, amounts to a complex network of B2B, B2B2C, and D2C (direct-to-consumer) relationships. Each of these partnerships is vital to revenue and valuable to extending the reach and impact of the Brother brand experience. Effectively managing all of them requires a highly dependable digital integration platform solution that delivers agility, visibility, and control over the company’s high volume of EDI-based transactions – over 85% of the company’s total sales volume relies on EDI – which is where Cleo Integration Cloud comes in.

Among Brother International’s largest trading partners by EDI volume are United Parcel Service and Geodis. Some of its largest customers include SP Richards, Office Depot, Walmart, and Staples. In the D2C channel, the company sells via its own website or through Amazon. All told, Brother processes well over 25,000 /day or 600,000 EDI transactions per month, and virtually all these are processed through the Cleo Integration Cloud platform.

SOLUTION

BTHE SOLUTION
Steel Technologies deployed Cleo Integration Cloud and upgraded its critical EDI communications. With Cleo technology, the company gained improved:

• Ease of use and trading partner setup
• Error handling when communications drop
• Email alerts and notifications
• Document tracking and reporting

Steel Technologies now leverages a secure, stable platform that can scale as needed, allowing the steel processing giant to meet customer SLAs and order to cash.