Marieke Smits 0:00:02.9:

With us today is Thijs van Dongen, Head of Business Planning at Tata Steel, and he will be delivering the Tata Steel customer journey, so I would like to welcome you on to the stage. Can I have a warm welcome? 

Thijs van Dongen 0:00:17.4:

Well, thank you. Thank you very much for the warm welcome, but also the opportunity to practice my public speaking. This is new for me, this set-up and such a large audience, but thanks for the invite. Let me start with a short introduction of myself. My name is Thijs van Dongen. I joined Tata Steel in 2015, so round about a decade with the company. I'm currently heading the business planning department and on an interim basis, also responsible for the fulfilment department on the supply chain domain. I have two kids, [Siebe*] and [Mette*], four and two, with corresponding challenges, and we live in Sassenheim together with my wife, [?Vicke]. You actually see [Siebe*] here on the picture. He was on my back and after a two-hour walk, he said, 'Dad, I've gotten a little bit tired,' so those are the type of things that you bump into.

Thijs van Dongen 0:01:19.5:

Yes, so besides work, I really like to enjoy to play some tennis. If you look at how often I play, I should get a bit better. I like to do some kitesurfing, although time and flexibility are hampering me. It is, by the way, a very good way to see the mountainside from the ocean. There are a couple of things that I would like to discuss with you today, which I would like to present. One is a little bit about our company, what are we talking about, also a little bit about our transition to green steel that we are heading towards. Yes, we're invited by Anaplan, so let's also talk a little bit about our One TSN Planning journey in Anaplan. Before we continue, I think it's important to stress that you are using steel every day. If there would be no steel in this building, we would simply not be standing here at this height. You would also simply not have gotten here. Most modes of transportation, your car, your public transport, your bike are made of steel. You would also have been washing your dishes by hand last night if there was no steel in your dishwasher. Although I don't think that you have used an excavator recently, it's hard to think of a life - oh, you did. [Laughter] Okay.

Unknown Speaker 0:02:48.4:

[Unclear words 0:02:48.4] lucky person.

Thijs van Dongen 0:02:57.2:

Okay, [laughs] but I think what I tried to say, it's quite hard to think of a society without steel, hey, it's not a luxury product. Fortunately, as the name suggests, there is a steel-making company in the Netherlands situated in IJmuiden, formerly known as Hoogovens. We produce around about seven million tons of steel, which is the equivalent of seven million cars in weight, so a lot of volume. We have 21 locations across Europe that further process that steel, so think, for example, about a tube maker, a steel tube maker. Turnover €6 billion, almost 12,000 people employed at Tata Steel Netherlands, of which the vast majority works in IJmuiden. It's important to note that there is not one type of steel. According to this presentation, there are 17,000 types of steel. Well, it depends a little bit how you take the definition, but you can imagine that the steel for the door of a car needs different characteristics, how the surface quality is important compared to the steel that's used in a building, where maybe strength is more important.

Thijs van Dongen 0:04:11.7:

Yes, and they dare to put it on the slide that we're also a sustainability champion already. [Laughs] Pushing it. No, so I think it's - let's be open about it. Producing steel is a very CO2 intensive process, so five per cent to seven per cent of the global CO2 emissions, they come from steel production, but within the steel plants, Tata Steel IJmuiden has been recognized quite often, I think six times in a row or so by the World Steel Association as one of the most efficient plants. More on that later because we need to go a lot further, but I saw that we have a very nice company video which I would really like to show you that's been made fairly recently. I found out earlier this week, but I think it's a nice way to get an impression of what this company is about. There we go. 

[Video plays 0:05:10.8 - 0:09:36.8]

Thijs van Dongen 0:09:36.8:

I think that was a good part of the video. The first part is the most interesting, so let's continue. Yes, like I said, I would like to share a little bit on the green steel journey that we are on. This is a slide that contains our mission and vision statement of the company, so you see all these steel applications. In the middle, your refrigerator, your car, your dishwasher, whatsoever, but the words at the top, I think they are most important here. We would like to be a clean, green and circular steel company, and clean is very much aimed at the local emissions in the direct environment. There's been a lot of debate on that up until the Dutch Parliament in recent years, and there's quite a big program ongoing, the Roadmap Plus program where over €300 million euros are invested to improve in that area. You should really think about, for example, big windshields around our storages of coals and iron ore in order to prevent that leaving our premises with high wind speeds, for example, or huge industrial exhausts to make sure that certain gasses do not end up in the atmosphere. So, I think quite significant improvements are already made, but norms of society are also continuously increasing, which I think is good, so also more opportunities to be made. 

Thijs van Dongen 0:11:09.3:

Circular, I think it speaks for itself. We don't have unlimited resources on our planet, so moving towards more circular economies for which steel is a very good product as you can melt it again. Green, I think [?Tata are 0:11:26.7] most passionate about that one. That's very much about climate change, yes. It's that we are relatively efficient from a CO2 perspective plant, but still, it's a lot of CO2 emissions. How can we reduce that further? There are some big things currently going on. This is the first slide that I made myself, I think you can probably see that, [laughs] but in a nutshell, what is happening is that we are moving away from coal-based steel making, and I think that is what it boils down to. Moving towards a situation where you use hydrogen and electricity for the steel-making process. I depicted the before and after situation, and if you look at the situation before, let me briefly explain how you make steel. You purchase iron ore and coal, and the iron ore is transformed into sinter and pellets in [unclear words 0:12:29.1] factories, and pellets is kind of like an iron ore marble. 

Thijs van Dongen 0:12:34.1:

The coal is produced into cokes, and cokes is like a porous lava type of rock. Why is that important - because it allows air to come, yes, get into all layers of the blast furnace process. Then what you do is layer by layer from the top, you actually saw that in the video, you add the sinter and pellets, then the cokes, then the sinter and pellets, then the cokes into the blast furnace where two important things take place. First of all, you need heat to melt the iron, but also you need to reduce the iron oxide because if you mine iron, you never find it in a pure form. You always find it oxidizes in open air, rust effectively, so you need to get rid of these oxygen atoms, and the cokes play a big role in that. Then you also saw in the movie that this hot metal is poured into the torpedoes from the blast furnace. It's being moved into the steel plant where you transform it into actual steel, basically. You make sure that the chemical position reaches what you require for that certain grade, and you add oxygen in order to lower the carbon content.

Thijs van Dongen 0:13:53.6:

This is also the part where scrap is added, so that's round about 20 per cent, so basically steel coming back from society, being melted again to go back into society. Where are we heading towards is the situation in the bottom right. You see that the coal has removed, so we still need to make pellets, these iron ore marbles if you like, but now the reduction will take place in the DRI plant, so getting rid of these oxygen atoms, molecules. You can do that with hydrogen or natural gas if there was not yet hydrogen available, but yes, that's clearly a lot better for the environment than coal. Still, you need to melt it, but you will do that with electric arc furnaces, so based on electricity, and then you basically have the same steps in the steel making. I'm probably oversimplifying it a little bit, but from that point onwards the change is more or less the same. This is really the part where all the CO2 emissions are, so we are aiming to close the first blast furnace - we have two - by 2030. That will reduce on itself forty per cent of our CO2 emissions which is five million tons, so that is... The world CO2 emissions due to steel is round about five to seven per cent. 

Thijs van Dongen 0:15:15.3:

That's the same for the Netherlands, so you can imagine how big this step is for the Netherlands. Then the aim is, at the later stage, that the second blast furnace will follow and then we will be fully away from coal-based steel making. What we are quite happy about is that round about two months ago, a joint Letter of Intent was signed between our shareholder TSL, the company itself TSN, the Dutch Government and the Province of North Holland, to speak out that this is what we want to achieve, together with corresponding funding but also corresponding conditions, so I really hope that we're going to make this happen. You can imagine that this is really open-heart surgery on our site in IJmuiden because we can't simply stop the operations for a couple of years, then transform the site, send us on holiday, then back and get working again, so we need to do this while the steel plant is operating. I've a few pictures on this, so this is more or less schematically how we're currently set up. The coal and the iron ore comes in in the North Sea canal, sinter plants, cokes plants, two blast furnaces and a steel plant at the south side of our premises. This is quite a large plot of land.

Thijs van Dongen 0:16:35.7:

Then the first phase, you see that one of the blast furnaces will disappear. That will be phase one, and the DRI plant for the reduction process and electric arc furnace for the melting of the iron ore will be in place. You also see green electricity coming from the wind farms in this picture, and a transformer station [unclear words 0:16:57.0]. This is actually already there. I know that, well, kitesurfing in front of [unclear words 0:17:01.7]. Then the end state, yes, you will see that the second blast furnace is also gone, so no more cokes plants. It's really steel making with DRI and electric arc furnaces. I personally really hope that we are going to make that, and the main reason for that, why I have a job there, that's of course one, but most importantly what I think would really be a shame - we're all using steel so if - that we're not going to export the problem, because then effectively you will have the same amount of steel produced in the world. It's just happening somewhere else out of sight, and your two molecules don't have passports, so for the global problem it doesn't really solve anything. That's my personal hope, so let's see.

Thijs van Dongen 0:17:55.3:

Then a little bit about One TSN Planning, where we used Anaplan very extensively. Let me first explain a little bit about our department. Like I said, I'm heading the business planning department and we are responsible for the sales and operations planning process. We are basically organized in three sub-teams. First of all, we have a longer-term horizon planning team. That's more six to thirty-six months ahead, and here you should really think about, for example, an annual plan, so setting up what's the optimal moment to have your annual maintenance of the different factories? What's going to be the long-term sales plan for a certain sales sector? How much should they sell of a certain product? Also, very much target setting. The annual plan will be the target for the rest of the year. We also have a repair team. We stole that terminology from our UK colleagues when we were still organized in a European fashion, because what you typically see is that things don't go as expected. They are not actually still in line with our annual plan, so due to disruptions both on the supply and also the demand side. 

Thijs van Dongen 0:19:15.5:

Demand, I think some clear recent examples, the Corona crisis, for example, huge fallout of steel demand. Chip crisis having a lot of impact on car sales in Europe. Recently, Mr Trump and his 50 per cent import tariffs on the EU, which has a very big impact on our company. Round about 20 per cent of our volume went into the US, which has now reduced. From a supply side, yes, I think what's important to know about that still is that most facilities are operated 24/7, which means that if you have a bad production day you can't do overtime, because you're already working for 100 per cent of the time. Also, from that end, there was immediate rebalancing needed in case that you don't hit the plan. The short-term team is basically doing that as their daily task, to rebalance to a new optimal situation with what you know at that moment in time. Then we have the Anaplan CoE, so also - well, actually all of them present today, [?Ruth Arnop and Davide 0:20:25.7] who are helping us within the team to build good planning, so far effectively.

Thijs van Dongen 0:20:34.9:

How did we get here? In '22, updating them by now with years because there have been quite some reorganizations recently, but there we had a reorganization. Pre that reorganization, planning was organized in quite some different teams. We had a longer-term team, shorter-term team, a demand planning team, a sales planner. We had a, I think I missed one, demand forecasting, not all in the same reporting lines as well, so not overly efficient. I think a fairly good thing from that reorganization is that we said, look, we're going to bring that under one business planning roof. Anaplan CoE was already there, but in a different department, would become part of the planning team in order to speed up the efficiency in that area. That was basically the start of the One TSN Planning journey, where we tried to work towards a more integrated, efficient planning, tooling and processes. We used a couple of principles, and I thank ChatGPT for the nice pictures here.

Thijs van Dongen 0:21:48.0:

Let's start with the first one. One platform, so you see one big weight crushing all the spreadsheets, and in our case, that was Anaplan. So really our philosophy was let's bring all these different tools and processes into one tool, and we think that we can benefit from that later. One truth, for example, input parameters for our planning could be speed of works, yields, percentages that go into [?second charts 0:22:16.5], these type of things. If you're using the same type of data, really use the same data points. That's another principle that we tried to apply. Alignment where possible. I already said we have 21 production location, different entities within Tata Steel Netherlands. Some models did include the downstream, others didn't. Let's choose one common scope from long-term planning to short-term planning. Granularity, you can divide your customers in many, many ways. Choose the same. Product hierarchy, you can divide your products in many, many categories, choose the same. That was one of the things that we wanted to achieve and automate. If you see that there was repetitive work, try to think of ways how you can automate that.

Thijs van Dongen 0:23:05.1:

Yes, so that's how we started and tried to bring everything together. I think that was quite successful. Looking at the summary here, so I think it took us round about two years to get everything into Anaplan with the great help of the Anaplan Center of Excellence present today. One scope across the board, so we basically decided to make a detailed model for the IJmuiden hub and leave the downstream entities outside of the detailed model, but we applied sort of a consolidation step, if you like, a consolidation model next to the detailed model, but on both horizons, both short and long-term planning. Levels of granularity are the same where possible, or at least a [unclear words 0:23:58.4] relation. Repetitive work automated, I think that's... We had a lot of work before. For example, when the longer-term team made a plan, I was back then on the shorter-term planning horizon. You would export it, you would receive the Excel, you would make your translations and then you would import it in our planning environment.

Thijs van Dongen 0:24:21.1:

Sometimes we then found out two months into the quarter that we forgot a filter setting and missed [?15 KT 0:24:26.8] in the total picture, so I think this really, really helps to automate these type of steps. Also then pushing this volume into, the demand management into the legacy systems to reduce the errors. I think that was very nice. It's more efficient. It took us quite some time, but also work joy, yes, so I think we have fairly intelligent people in our team. This type of simple repetitive task is not exactly what makes you come to work with joy, so I think that's also an important side benefit. One source of truth, I think we have achieved that where possible. Also, there from my own experience, we had quite some occasions that some - you would've just presented your longer-term plan, and when you filled it into the shorter-term plan, there was an imbalance from the start because you simply used different definitions, different assumptions. That's, of course, not what you want to explain to your sales director that the world turned out to be a little bit different because of vague assumption changes.

Thijs van Dongen 0:25:30.9:

We are out of that situation so both towards the external world, I think that's a lot better, and it also saves a lot of zoek de vergekijking, seek the comparison, type of exercises between the planning teams. Reporting, so big shout out to [?Amita] by the way. He came up with that. Anaplan actually had quite okay reporting functionality. Yes, it was actually a bit of a bonus. It was not something we intended to have from the start, but now most of our planning outputs are automatically generated PDFs out of which we then, well, pick the charts that we need for the next management presentation. I think it saves us work, that's nice, but it also comes across more professional. That, for me as a manager, is also a nice to have. Yes, so I'm quite happy with that. I find it very hard to measure your success in terms of how much extra euros did you gain as a company because of your better planning process, but I think one thing that you can measure quite easily is how many people worked in planning five years ago with how many are we today. You can debate a little bit the definition, company also changed slightly, but I would say it's a safe assumption that we at least halved in terms of staff. No forced leavers, by the way. If you look at the workload, it's not by just working twice as hard.

Thijs van Dongen 0:26:58.4:

I think with a healthy work-life balance, we are simply achieving the same things, and I would argue of a higher quality due to the steps that we took, so I am very happy basically. That we were able to go through this journey was quite interesting. Some do's and don'ts. There was one that someone mentioned here, which I didn't put on the list but is really true, and that is, don't make a one-to-one copy of your spreadsheet and move into Anaplan. We also did that and we rebuilt these models five years later down the road, so not on the slide but would happily add that. Bringing everything to one platform really helped. In the beginning, it's a lot of work. Long run, I think it helped us a lot. What also helped, I think, organization-wise is to have the Anaplan team very close to us, so it was really part of my team, and I think although you of course could organize it in any set-up, I think it helps to have the communication lines short and to have a good common understanding to get where we are today, and just start.

Thijs van Dongen 0:28:05.1:

Don't spend too much time on design because you can't oversee the problem anyway. That's also something we learnt the hard way along the way. Sometimes that also means simply restarting it, so I think we have a few examples where we just restarted and, yes, accepted that we took a wrong turn somewhere. Ask for forgiveness, mainly at your model builders, and just crack on. Yes, that would be my dos and don'ts in this area. Anaplan, yes, how did Anaplan help us as a platform? I was not involved in the selection process of Anaplan; it was already there at the company. I also don't have shares in Anaplan although that looks like a good idea if I look at your growth, but I could tell you from my perspective how, what I experienced as good things from Anaplan. I think one is that it's flexible enough, we don't use the predefined models, to set up your own planning models in the way that you like to have them, but it's inflexible enough to break it continuously as a user, which happens very often in Excel. You make more effort to change it, which sometimes also is good, and also forces you in certain structures, which I think is also good in the long run.

Thijs van Dongen 0:29:33.6:

Multi-user, I thought that was fairly strong, so for example, our demand forecasts and account manager that provides the demand forecasts will have completely different rights than a model builder who has got rights on the platform. Online, we're not all working in the same environments within [unclear words 0:29:55.0] so that really helps to get the company-wide collaboration going. Reporting functionality, like I said, I thought that was a fairly strong bonus point. Where are we heading? Good to mention. This is not the only area where we use Anaplan. Also workforce planning, maintenance planning. Which other? [Unclear words 0:30:13.9] to other monitoring are already done in Anaplan apps in the company. There's currently discussions ongoing with the finance domain, quite a few of them are present. I heard they're still using spreadsheets, by the way, so we're in good discussion to see if we can move to Anaplan now, but in all fairness, we first need some discussions there. I see that I'm out of time, and that's good because I'm also at the end of my presentation.