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ILVA AND SB ITALIA: A “FUTURE-PROOF” ENTERPRISE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE PROJECT

From a legacy environment to a best-in-class Business Intelligence infrastructure, with an ad-hoc project to make information and analyses accessible to the different business areas.

THE REQUIREMENT

ILVA Group focuses its operations on the production and processing of steel. In Italy and in other countries it boasts 16 production units and service centers, all integrated with each other.

To analyze data and information, the company relied on a very large legacy environment; although, being supported by external consultants, the company managed to extrapolate key information, the relevant data was unstructured and only intended for data display; this because the company was using personal productivity tools such as Excel tools. In fact, the main limitation of this approach was the non-uniqueness of the collected information resulting from the fact that “certified data” simply did not exist.

After the new corporate reorganization resulting from the well-known events that have affected the company in the last years, the adoption of a reliable tool able to monitor the different business activities became an unavoidable and urgent necessity, thus leading the management to use smart and best-of-breed tools able to solve the problems related to a non-centralized data collection. The Finance area was the pilot of the new system.

THE SOLUTION

Since the half of 2014, ILVA relied on the skills of SB Italia in order to redesign its analysis and reporting architecture. By adopting the guidelines of the Gartner Bimodal IT methodology, SB Italia has implemented an “agile” initial delivery based on the fast release of a specific analysis area; moreover, it has focused development efforts on the sharing of end user requirements and on the “fast” resolution of technology- and application-related problems.

In this way, SB Italia was able to provide in short time an early version of the new investment report that enabled an homogeneous view of ILVA core business processes while allowing users to monitor the progress of an order, from its issue to invoicing and payment. The solution considered to be the most appropriate for this initial approach was QlikView, a best-of-breed Business Intelligence tool enabling data analyses provided in short times and actions on single processes performed timely.

After the implementation of the new analysis tool in the Finance area, ILVA felt the need to have a most effective Business Intelligence infrastructure by extending the management report to include also other segments of the Finance area as well as Sales and Production departments. SB Italia carried out an enhancement of the reference architecture and system in Enterprise mode; it developed a “stable” DataWarehouse and implemented the alternative delivery mode envisaged by the BImodal IT framework.

During the whole 2015, this approach enabled to produce reports and analysis dashboards for the multiple ILVA mission-critical areas while enabling the usage of the most valuable information for each single process.

Considering the project success, ILVA will further enable users to become more independent by giving them the freedom to create their reports and analysis dashboards autonomously, without any support by IT colleagues (Self Service BI). To this end, ILVA is considering whether to implement – in addition to the QlikView system – also the QlikSense solution that features a simple interface and very high user-friendliness.

THE RESULT

ILVA has now a centralized and smart Business Intelligence tool able to facilitate the usage of certified data and to share information with the different company departments; this allows the company to develop reports and analyses in short time and to use data to optimize processes.

“Through the activities carried out with SB Italia, we have now a state-of-the-art and extremely flexible Business Intelligence infrastructure that allows us to carry out different types of analysis on the basis of certified, organized and centralized data. The agile methodology adopted and the usage of Qlik solutions have allowed us to integrate new analysis systems during the project; by making applications accessible also to non tech-savvy users, we enable them to use data to optimize processes and increase the productivity of each business area” declares Matteo Veneziani, IT System Manager at ILVA Group.

“Our mission is to provide companies with innovative systems that integrate ad-hoc solutions implemented and designed according to business requirements and objectives. The expertise of the team involved in the activities and their certifications in the systems adopted has allowed ILVA to have a sophisticated and easily accessible analysis tool that provides a substantial support to its business” says Luca Rodolfi, SB Italia.
SB Italia

SB Italia is a company specialized in IT solutions for the management, integration and optimization of business processes. With its mission aimed at facilitating the creation of the so called “venture system”, it provides next-generation, easy to implement IT solutions, skills and services that bring measurable benefits to enterprises.

With regard to consultancy, project development and management, SB Italia stands out for capacity of synthesis, focus on practical issues and ability to analyze every business process phase based on a holistic approach. These features allow SB Italia to transform customer requirements into tangible results in the short term, while optimizing resources, creating added value and performing cost-saving activities.