ArcelorMittal

The Europe Flat Products division embarked on an initiative to migrate from a plethora of point-to-point connections with individual trading partners to a single, seamless B2B network solution. One of ArcelorMittal’s principal objectives in adopting this strategy was a desire to facilitate and accelerate the process of adding new customers to its B2B eCommerce network, enhancing its capability to deliver new solutions.

In addition, the company wanted to reduce the support and maintenance costs of older mainframe-based B2B applications that had been developed in-house.

Outsourcing with OpenText™ B2B Managed Services ArcelorMittal made the decision to outsource the management of its EDI network using OpenText B2B Managed Services. FCE, having already centralized and consolidated its IT operations into a single center in Dunkerque, France, now wanted to do the same with B2B eCommerce. OpenText took over the management of routing and translation for more than 100,000 EDI messages that were sent between ArcelorMittal’s different trading partners around the world every month. Outsourcing a patchwork of different, fragmented B2B trading networks via B2B Managed Services emerged as a very powerful proposition, especially for a large corporation like ArcelorMittal. Running B2B applications in-house can be difficult, time consuming and costly, but B2B Managed Services took away the need to maintain low-level expertise in B2B technology in-house and provided efficiency improvements that made core business processes smoother and more reliable.

Benefiting from the OpenText footprint in the worldwide automotive industry

Historically, only 40 percent of ArcelorMittal’s connectivity was achieved via the OpenText Trading Grid, while 60 percent depended on point-to-point connections. A solution was required to unify the connections for greater control and faster access. David Toulotte, domain manager, IT Europe, “By replacing the point-to-point connections with a single pipe between our IT operations and the OpenText network, and outsourcing the associated technical challenges to OpenText, we were able to boost efficiency, allowing us to connect more customers more quickly.”

With more than 45 years of automotive industry experience, OpenText has one of the largest B2B networks in the world, supporting an unmatched automotive customer base. OpenText also participates in a number of automotive industry bodies around the world, including North America’s Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) and Europe’s Odette and Galia associations. The breadth of experience and knowledge that OpenText brought was evident when supporting ArcelorMittal. “We benefit from the experience that OpenText has in the automotive sector because they are already working with many of our customers and understand the customer technology requirements in depth,” explained Toulette.

“With B2B Managed Services, we will increase global visibility across our base of B2B transactions with considerably improved monitoring capabilities. The global footprint of OpenText is very important to us as we need to ultimately be able to connect to a customer anywhere in the world,” added Toulette.

Over time, ArcelorMittal plans to work with OpenText to assess how to extend the reach of B2B Managed Services to include additional trading partners, including new suppliers and major banks.