CUSTOMER: Steel Company

Business Needs: The Steel Company specializes in the delivery of certified steel components for bridges, oil rigs and other projects requiring documented steel specifications from locations across several states. The company accepted inventory along with the associated certification documents. The components had to be tracked so that shipping from any of the four branch locations could be accompanied by the appropriate, batch, heat, component, and vendor certification. The process was paper based with faxing of certifications between locations. The company needed a system that could support the inventory of thousands of components and they ability to find, print and delivery the certification weeks or months after the component had been received at the central steel yard.

Solution and Approach: After reviewing the business processes from intake of the steel at the yard to eventual delivery to the job site with the certification, Aspenware proposed a scanning and indexing application for the certifications as products entered the yard. The administrative interface allowed the user to rapidly index the components based on the key properties. The functions were configured with several roles from administrator (allowed to add new employees and configure access and approval) to user (allowed to view and print certifications at the branch). The solution greatly simplified the approach and improved the efficiency of the steel certification process. The application, using the same database and architecture was extended to a support the management of the hundreds of credit applications that were used by the company. This was done by simply setting up a new set of roles that allowed access to the credit information that was scanned in to the common database. The result was one database, with the presentation layer driving two different applications.

Applications: Portal Infrastructure, Document Management, Search, Scanning, Role Based Configuration