Tubacex
Data Governance for the transformation of the Tubacex Group into a Data Driven Company
The project
The Tubacex Group is active in the production and sale of seamless tubes in stainless steel and high nickel alloys. It also manufactures other long stainless steel products.
Tubacex is a multinational group with a global presence that promotes proximity to markets and customers. It has production centres in Spain, the United States, Thailand, India, Austria, Italy, as well as commercial offices in the countries most important in Europe, the United States, China, Dubai and Brazil. In order to offer the best service to its customers, it has with distribution warehouses and product stock in multiple geographies.
Due to its expansion, Tubacex had its data spread over more than 20 different environments, making it difficult to their management and highlighting the need to a Data Governance initiative that would establish the mechanisms necessary for comprehensive data management.
Challenges
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Managing and controlling the company's master data -
Implementation of a Business Intelligence tool from a governed Data Pool -
Production control through reliable dashboards
The solution
The project was structured on the basis of the following phases:
Phase 1: Strategic definition of Data Governance
During this first phase, the strategic foundations were laid for the development of a global Data Governance project, with the main objective of integrating all corporate information from different sources into a single system, as well as its subsequent automation.
This would allow for a holistic management of the company's data and ensure access to knowledge. For this, the informational ecosystem of Tubacex was analyzed, as well as business needs regarding data, advising in the selection of those suitable technologies on which develop the project.
Phase 2: Design and development of the corporate Data Pool for the commercial use case
During this phase, a corporate Data Pool was built to manage the master and transactional tables of the different business units for the commercial area of Tubacex. It is a scalable model, adapted to the requirements of the business at all times and with the ability to adapt before possible changes that could arise.
In order to implement it, the starting point was the business users of the corporation, analysing the information requirements that they needed to have in the Data Pool, to subsequently communicate them to each business unit involved.
Through Web Services, each business unit sent its transactional information, and through a process developed in Pentaho Data Integration (PDI), collected, cleaned, transformed and integrated the information, storing it in the Data Pool corporate.
Once the information is arranged centrally in a single repository, Qlik applications were developed for present information visually.
Phase 3: Integration in the corporate Data Pool of the purchasing and stock information
With the corporate Data Pool already in production, the scope of the project was extended in a new phase to include two new business-critical use cases, stocks and purchasing and supply chain. business-critical use cases, stocks and purchasing and supply chain.
During this new phase, the new lists, master and transactional tables with the information of these new areas have been defined integrating them into the data model of the corporate Data Pool. In addition, the master data management tool Microsoft Data Services (MDS) was incorporated, carrying out the corresponding migration and establishing the rules to guarantee the quality of the information.
Finally, as was the case in the commercial phase, Qlik applications have been included that are able to visually displaying the Tubacex Group's information.
Phase 4: Monitoring and maintenance
Although it is not a regular phase 4, at the end of each of the use cases and the production of information, a maintenance and monitoring phase begins in which Izertis provides the necessary support to Tubacex for daily operations of the project, controlling the daily updates of information and acting in the event of any possible incidences.
In addition, being a scalable model capable of adapting to new information needs, Izertis collaborates in the development of evolutionary that improve the user experience, both of the corporate Data Pool and of the Qlik applications that display the information.
The result
With all this, the Tubacex Group has been positioned as a data driven company, capable of extracting value from data and treat them as active plus.
Thanks to the new corporate Data Pool, it has a centralised repository of truth in which data is reliable and governed. Moreover, thanks to the development of customised dashboards, it is able to control production and thus consolidate its leadership in the sector.