Metinvest Holding is a global steel and mining company owning vast iron ore reserves, coal mines, and steelmaking assets in Europe and North America. The company ranks among the top 50 largest steel companies in the world, according to the World Steel Association. Metinvest Digital is the IT Company in Metinvest Group. It is responsible for overseeing the IT function and all IT processes in the Group, as well as improving the quality of services provided. In addition to supporting IT users, Metinvest Digital works to identify best digital practices that will add value and act as an agent of change. The rationale for making it a separate business unit is to build strong, customer-focused relationships with all internal clients.
Location:
Ukraine, Mariupol
Industry:
Steel and Mining
Partnership period:
May 2018 - present
Client backgroundClient background
Client’s goals Client’s goals
Metinvest Digital was looking for a reliable partner with strong technical and business expertise in OpenText to implement OpenText Extended ECM for SAP. The client wanted to get the best out of their solution and set the following goals:
- Increase the number of documents the system can process per day
- Boost the processing speed of the system
- Make the system easy to scale
ChallengesChallenges
- Performing a comprehensive system audit;
- Redesigning the tech infrastructure and solution architecture developed by a previous integrator;
- Analyzing the source code and refactoring it;
- Migrating users from the old system to the new one;
- Training users on how to effectively use the system.
ImplementationImplementation
Conducting a performance audit
Before kicking off the project, our experts carried out a comprehensive analysis of the system. They had a one-week trip to the client site to gather and analyze the necessary data on the system from the technical and business perspective. N-iX team prepared a detailed report and presented a number of suggestions for improving the system performance.
Development of new tech infrastructure
After the successful completion of the system audit, we got down to improving the technical infrastructure. Initially, the system landscape consisted of one Development Server (Dev), one Quality Assurance Server (QA), and one Production Server (Prod). Our experts offered to create a cluster of 8 servers for Dev and QA landscapes. So now the system consists of 17 instead of 3 servers. The servers don’t replicate each other, but different services are moved to different servers – e.g. Front-end server, Database server, etc.
Upgrading the system to the new version
The system is used by accountants to manage purchases, sales, and other finance activities of Metinvest assets. Our main task was to upgrade the system to the latest version of OpenText Extended ECM so that it could cope with large volumes of data and many users that work in parallel. Our team installed new instances of OpenText Extended ECM for SAP Solutions for the development, testing, and production systems and migrated settings and data from the legacy system. We determined in advance what issues might arise in the process of the system upgrade and took proactive steps to prevent them.
Code refactoring and development of new functionality
Our next step was to rebuild the system to improve its performance. We designed new business workflows with the help of OpenText WebReports. It allowed creating dashboards, business reports, and documents directly within Content Server without the need for custom OScript module development.
Besides, we developed custom functionality according to the client’s requirements with OScript module. Our team built SAP links that ensured seamless linking of documents from ECM with business objects in SAP. This guaranteed faster access to stored documents without the need for time-consuming searches.
N-iX team was also working on a desktop application for reading barcodes that was integrated with OpenText Extended ECM for SAP. The solution was written in C# and designed to help simplify the process of registering a package of documents for accountants with the help of a barcode that was generated in the SAP system. In such a way, the registration process of documents has significantly accelerated. As long as the system performed badly with a number of malfunctions, N-iX developers refactored a great part OScript module and software code in C#.
Our developers at N-iX contributed to rewriting a Property Provider in ABAP in SAP with the help of which metadata from SAP could be transferred to the OpenText Extended ECM system. Our team was responsible for code refactoring and building new functionality to make the property provider more flexible and maintainable.
We developed an admin application in Java using Angular 6 to create an intuitive user interface. This solution is used to support a single sign-on for an SAP user into the OpenText Extended ECM system and serves as an administration console for managing users. We migrated users from the old system to the new one and developed a mechanism that ensures the automatic assignment of users to groups of the OpenText Extended ECM system on the basis of their roles in SAP.
Within the project, a Microsoft SQL server was used for database management. With the help of live reports, we communicated with a database of Content Server that sent the necessary info on a request to WebReports to represent the data to end users in a form of dashboards or to automate background operations with a user interface (manage user permissions, move data between folders, etc.).
Training
As a part of our OpenText Professional Services, we developed comprehensive technical documentation on how to use the system effectively. Additionally, we provided in-depth training for a number of system users. It consisted of several waves:
- training for the focus team from Metinvest Digital;
- training for the managers that are responsible for the successful performance of business processes;
- a live training session for about 100 participants from Metinvest.
Post go-live support
In December 2018, the project went live. After successful implementation of an OpenText Extended ECM for SAP, we provided Metinvest Holding with post go-live support to help them efficiently maintain the system.
Value delivered by N-iXValue delivered
N-iX has provided end-to-end professional services from conducting business analysis and developing tech infrastructure to training and post go-live support of the OpenText Extended ECM for SAP solution.
The team has established effective communication with the client and developed detailed planning of every project stage. Thus, we have successfully completed a number of tasks that guarantee the smooth performance of the system.
Thanks to the new tech infrastructure and advanced functionality, the system can process more than 7,000 documents per day. The performance of the user interface and the completion of the archiving process have been improved manyfold. Therefore, it has allowed our customer to streamline their operations, improve productivity, and gain maximum value from their OpenText investment.
We’ve had several OpenText-based projects implemented for efficient enterprise information management across different companies of the Holding. Partnership with N-iX allowed us to deliver these projects on time at a high quality level and achieve all our business goals. During our collaboration, the N-iX team helped us find effective architecture solutions to satisfy our business needs without any system downtime. This allowed us to achieve good business performance in processing documents across different systems and companies of the Holding within the deadlines set by the customer. The flexibility of the solutions within the delivered projects makes it possible to apply them to similar business processes at other companies of our Holding.
Head of Finance Processes Department, Metinvest Digital
Services:
Expertise delivered:
Technologies:
Java,
C#, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, JQuery; libraries: DataTables, JQGrid; frameworks: Angular 6; DB: MS SQL; proprietary languages: OScript, ABAP, WebReports.
7,000
documents processed per day
Boosting
the processing speed of the system
Automating
business processes
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