Tata Steel Nederland fuses planning for strength and flexibility

Steel can have great strength, flexibility, and other qualities because it’s an alloy. Tata Steel Nederland produces nearly seven million tons of steel annually, so the company is skilled at alloying specific elements to create a superior product. Not surprisingly, the planning team at Tata Steel is skilled at bringing together — alloying, if you will — data and teams to create superior sales and operations planning (S&OP).

This strength and flexibility has developed over time. “We were simply not able to make the best-quality plans because we spent too much time bringing data together,” recalls Thijs van Dongen, Head of Business Planning at Tata Steel Nederland, of his team several years ago. Critical processes were handled in silos, and teams were bogged down by manual data consolidation that didn’t move the business forward.

Building stronger together

Tata Steel Nederland addressed these challenges with Anaplan starting in 2016. “Anaplan enabled us to integrate all the S&OP-related models, which were formerly done in different teams, onto one platform where we work in a very efficient and integrated way,” van Dongen says. In the years that followed, the team expanded the Anaplan footprint into sales and marketing, finance, and workforce planning based on that integrated vision.

While the company’s Anaplan use cases are familiar across industries, certain elements are configured for steelmaking. Two examples: Maintenance planning in Anaplan tracks periodic factory downtime so critical work can be scheduled around it, and a hedging model reduces risk in iron-ore purchasing.

Structure plus flexibility

From van Dongen’s vantage point, the greatest benefits from Anaplan come from increased supply chain collaboration, visibility, and connection. Aligned demand, supply, and financial plans help leaders make smarter, more strategic decisions, and planning on a single platform across teams has made it easier for planners to cover more of the business. “We’re able to integrate more planning processes and really take out cumbersome, repetitive work everywhere with the help of the Anaplan platform,” van Dongen explains.

This newfound efficiency has been a catalyst for other improvements, adds Ruud Dubbers, Anaplan Center of Excellence Lead at Tata Steel Nederland. “They spend less effort in executing the process, and have also better insights,” he says. “And that can trigger also new process improvements in the company.”

The company has also seen financial benefits. “Anaplan really helped me to improve the quality of our S&OP process,” van Dongen explains. “Higher quality S&OP outcomes lead to higher margins for the company in the long run.” 

In a way, S&OP on Anaplan is like the high-quality products made by Tata Steel Nederland: strong and versatile. “The Anaplan platform helps me to work within a certain structure,” Dubbers says. “My process is more structured without sacrificing flexibility.”