Thoughts on informatization of Chinese Metallurgic

Reflections on the informatization of China's metallurgical enterprises

I. preface

the source power of the development of metallurgical enterprises comes from the sustained high concentration of the world economy, especially the Chinese economy. It publicizes and reports the rapid development of the landmark achievements of 25 sets of major technical equipment. The main means of enterprise development include: technological innovation, management innovation, capacity expansion, enterprise merger and reorganization supported by capital operation, etc, The wide application and rapid development of information technology can greatly speed up the speed of enterprise managers' management ideas and management ideas into reality

due to the rapid development of information technology, economic globalization and global capital operation have become a reality, ”Global village "It is changing from concept to reality. The direct impact of information technology on the metallurgical industry is also obvious. Thanks to the means of interconnection and fast communication, the experience and knowledge of metallurgical manufacturing, management and operation can be spread and transferred around the world at the speed of light; with the rapid development of three-dimensional model technology, computer-aided design and manufacturing technology, our new processes and products have been developed from research and development to large-scale production The speed of production has been greatly accelerated, and the cycle of our plant and equipment from design, installation to production has been greatly shortened; Automatic control equipment, process control system (PCS), manufacturing execution system (MES) and other automatic control and manufacturing information technology means have greatly enhanced the production and manufacturing capacity of enterprises and improved product quality; The application and development of a series of enterprise management information technologies, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), supplier relationship management (SRM), product lifecycle management (PLM), have provided enterprise management with unprecedented management transparency and the ability to respond to changes in the industry market, and have closely integrated enterprise logistics information and value information, It has greatly accelerated the speed of enterprise decision-making and implementation cycle, greatly strengthened the management ability of enterprises, and continuously improved the performance of enterprises. Information technology not only helps enterprises manage their internal affairs, but also extends the management to the supply chain in which they are located. Through information technology, group metallurgical enterprises can easily manage all their enterprises across regions and borders. According to the needs of enterprise value management, they can extend their tentacles to the upstream and downstream of metallurgy through collaboration with upstream and downstream enterprises, Even through the acquisition of relevant enterprises through capital operation, we can directly expand the internal supply chain of the enterprise, ensure the supply of raw materials when the metallurgical demand is growing at a high speed and the supply of raw materials becomes a constraint, and even squeeze competitors by controlling the supply of raw materials. When the metallurgical demand is insufficient and the sales are not smooth, we can better find and understand the needs of customers through the strong and close partnership between downstream enterprises. On the one hand, By providing better products and services to gain competitive advantage, on the other hand, develop new products to meet the new needs of customers and the market, so as to ensure that enterprises are invincible in the new form of competition

Second, management informatization is one of the core strategies for the development of metallurgical enterprises

we can see that information technology is more and more widely and deeply used in the metallurgical industry. Not only that, information technology is also affecting all aspects of the world in an all-round way. The rapid development of the global economy brings opportunities and challenges to the development of the unified planning of the metallurgical industry, and breeds profound changes

because enterprise management informatization is an effective tool and means to realize the management ideas of enterprise managers, the realization of its value is not direct, especially in management, the value of management informatization is more difficult to quantify. Therefore, we must apply information technology to enterprise management at a strategic height, and we cannot just take it as a fashion to meet certain needs. The idea of taking information technology as a dispensable tool will bring disastrous consequences to metallurgical enterprises

enterprises realize their own value by providing value to customers, and realizing the value of enterprises is the strategic goal of enterprises. The task of management is to implement the decision-making of the enterprise to the executive level, track the implementation process of the decision, collect the results of the decision-making implementation to provide the basis for the next round of decision-making, and continuously improve the correctness and execution of the enterprise's decision-making through the PDCA cycle, so as to finally achieve the strategic objectives of the enterprise

if the traditional manual management method is used to support the rapid development and continuous expansion of the scale of the enterprise, it can only be achieved by continuously increasing the management level. With the increase of the management level, it means that the number of managers increases, and the process from decision-making to execution and from execution feedback to decision-making will be slower and slower. What's worse, due to the internal interests of the enterprise, the information will be distorted to varying degrees in the process of uploading and releasing. In order to ensure the effective transmission of information and the authenticity of information as much as possible, the enterprise needs to set up additional verification mechanisms to reduce this distortion, resulting in a sharp rise in management costs and abnormal low management efficiency. If large group enterprises want to operate across regions and borders, they need to communicate within the enterprise under the framework of different human environments and legal systems. The development and expansion of enterprises are limited by traditional management methods

information technology is an effective means to solve the above shortcomings. With the progress of information technology, many previously impossible things have become possible. Although enterprise management informatization is essentially just a tool to improve management efficiency and management transparency, it will bring revolutionary changes to enterprise management

with the support of an integrated and unified management information platform, business process reengineering can greatly speed up the efficiency of decision-making and implementation, and enterprises can easily manage larger enterprises without adding management levels. The information provided by the integrated and unified information platform for decision-makers is directly collected and summarized from specific business processing, without human intervention, Information is "high fidelity" "At the same time, when the decision-makers find abnormal information, they can also directly find the business points that have problems through the traceability function of information. The executive power of decision-making is greatly strengthened, and enterprises can realize the supply chain, cross regional and cross national scale expansion with a flat management structure.

of course, domestic enterprises also need external environment to realize large-scale mergers and acquisitions, such as capital market, government policies and management bodies But even if the external conditions are conducive to our mergers and acquisitions, does our enterprise already have the ability to expand rapidly? Can our management ability and information system support this kind of merger and acquisition in a short time? If the management ability of the enterprise is insufficient, the scale expansion brings not opportunities but greater risks to the enterprise, and the enterprise with indigestion will often become the object of mergers and acquisitions

in the process of its rapid expansion, the metallurgical giant Mittal, in addition to its superhuman capital operation ability and creativity in management and technology, is also inseparable from its correct information strategy. The adoption of a unified and integrated management information platform is one of its important strategies for rapid M & A. With the unified and integrated management information platform as the carrier, Mittal can export management to the merged enterprises in a relatively short time, helping the merged enterprises to turn losses into profits. While the unified and integrated management information platform also improves management efficiency, it brings huge benefits to the whole enterprise group

"as an iron and steel enterprise with an annual output of 70million tons and the world's first, Mittal has only 23 staff in its London headquarters and 20 in its Dutch headquarters. "-1

of course, the reason why Mittal can easily use information technology to support mergers and acquisitions is also inseparable from its advanced understanding and practice in management information technology. As early as 2001, Mittal began to implement enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) for its three factories in Germany And achieved good benefits. It can be seen that under the environment of rapid development of metallurgical industry and continuous improvement of industrial concentration, management informatization is one of the core strategies for the development of group enterprises

third, the correct management informatization strategy supports the rapid development of enterprises

enterprises have determined to take management informatization as one of the core strategies of enterprises, and they also need to choose the correct path of enterprise informatization, so that enterprise informatization can play a positive role in the process of making enterprises bigger and stronger. This paper mainly discusses the guiding ideology, system architecture and the selection of management information platform software

first of all, the management informatization of metallurgical enterprises should establish the guiding ideology of "taking supply chain management to meet the needs of the industry as the foundation and value management as the core." the yardstick to measure the advantages and disadvantages of iron and steel enterprises should be profit, "It's not output," said keshmi Mittal. But the steel industry has been dominated by chasing output in the past. Some competitors seem to have begun to attach importance to Mittal's view, for which keshmi is happy: "they have made it clear that if the product can't meet the expected price, you have to cut output. "

whether in the past or now, the survival and development of enterprises are carried out around value. Its high saturation color style and high gloss texture have also given plastics a high quality. Metallurgical enterprises are no exception, so the informatization construction of metallurgical enterprises must also be carried out closely around value management. However, due to the characteristics of metallurgical products and production organization, in the informatization process of metallurgical enterprises, production and marketing are integrated Integration has always been a difficulty and the focus of informatization. From the perspective of supply chain management, integrated production and marketing management is also an important part of supply chain management. Under the situation of increasing industrial concentration and the continuous extension of metallurgical industry chain to the upstream and downstream, we should not only pay attention to the integration of metallurgical production and marketing, but also comprehensively strengthen the management of supply chain, so as to achieve the goal of enterprise value management. Therefore, we believe that the informatization of metallurgical enterprises should be "based on supply chain management to meet the needs of the industry, Value management as the core ". the correct guiding ideology can help us make the right choice in the specific information construction process.

secondly, enterprise management information should be constructed according to the advanced and scientific information overall architecture.

the information construction of metallurgical enterprises is a complex system engineering, involving many technical fields, from automatic control technology to management information technology, and many different types of systems need to be established to realize the whole enterprise Informatization of industry. The informatization framework provides a framework for enterprise informatization construction. Enterprises can determine the division of labor of different systems according to this framework, or according to this framework, combined with the specific situation, carry out overall planning and step-by-step implementation, and finally realize the informatization of enterprise management in an all-round way. The informatization five layer architecture of the metallurgical industry is an informatization model widely recognized and implemented by industry insiders at present, as shown in the figure below:

when SAP proposed this architecture model a few years ago, many domestic metallurgical enterprises regarded the fifth layer as a concept. But today we have realized that taking inter enterprise management, namely supply chain management, as the fifth layer of enterprise information system architecture is an advanced idea, and a large number of domestic and foreign enterprise informatization practices have proved it