A Britehouse-managed project has breathed new life into a 25-year-old bespoke, Cobol-based, steel rope manufacturing system that provides the Steel Wire Rope division of Scaw Metals with its market differentiation.
Scaw Steel Wire Rope manufactures a wide range of highly specialised cables under the Haggie brand, such as those used in the Nelson Mandela Bridge, in Johannesburg, in 8km-deep mine shafts, and in oil tanker anchors.
The refresh project eliminated the risk to Scaw Steel Wire Rope's business continuity of a system that was ageing as a result of hardware, software, and skills support. By bringing the system onto a modern, 64-bit platform, the project has positioned the company to reduce its working capital through progressively greater integration of the manufacturing system with its SAP and other third-party environments, thus enabling continuous improvement of efficiency and workflow.
The Cobol manufacturing system was designed to automate the extremely complex scheduling processes by which various combinations of steel wire are prepared for winding onto a range of different bobbins, and from there, onto the 80 enormous winders that produce customised ropes, some weighing up to 200 tons.
“Initially, the system enabled us to reduce the number of people involved in the scheduling from about 60 to 10,” says Scaw Steel Wire Rope head of information systems, Gerhard Botha.
“However, if it were to go down now, the staff we have simply couldn't do the volume of work to keep the winders at 100% utilisation, and within five days, utilisation would drop to 5%, which would be disastrous for the bottom line.
“Because most of our Cobol specialists have left or retired, something as simple as a database filling up can cripple output. We had no choice but to create a supportable environment - at zero risk to the company.”
Scaw Metals turned to its SAP partner, Britehouse, to manage the project. This would keep the project methodologies consistent with those being used elsewhere in the organisation, to drive additional efficiencies out of its use of SAP. It would also prevent the refreshed Cobol system from affecting the integrity of the SAP environment.
The Cobol system's hardware and software had to be upgraded, making it necessary to source vendors internationally. External Cobol specialists, some of them retired, had to be recruited - and the latest script generators for Cobol itself had to be sourced.
A proof of concept and consequent preparation took three months, with the cutover taking place over four days, in December 2011, when production was at its lowest point.
“We had tried three times in the past 10 years to replace the Cobol system, always unsuccessfully,” Botha says. “However, because of the amount of upfront planning that was undertaken, and the commitment of everyone on the team, this project went more smoothly than any I've been part of in the past 20 years.
“Britehouse's project manager, Okker Jordaan, had the personal skills as well as the experience of SAP project management methodologies to generate commitment from the team and then shape that commitment to get optimal results from the methodologies.”
Britehouse SAP specialist division's Jordaan says SAP-specific activity on the project was kept to a minimum, to reduce variables, and therefore, project risk. “But, our overall focus for the Scaw Metals group is enabling it to optimise its utilisation of its SAP environment. So, we applied the same systems and architecture strategies to the Wire Rope project to ensure that the factory could make far more use of existing infrastructure, and do so more efficiently.
“By following the same vision, we could ensure long-term business continuity, not just in the factory, but within the larger group.”
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