Broner Metals Solutions

Broner Metals Solutions has announced that California Steel Industries (CSI) will implement a Broner Demand Planning solution at its plant in Fontana, California.

Broner will supply California Steel with Demand Modeller, one of many Advanced Planning and Scheduling modules, available from Broner, which will help the plant to improve customer service, planning of slab acquisition and capacity management.

The new Demand Planning solution will provide several business process improvements that will help CSI to manage its supply chain:

Orders will be tracked more accurately against forecasts and will provide early warning if deviations occur.
The demand forecasting functionality will allow various demand scenarios to be generated based on sales history, collaborative forecasts or other sources.
The Demand Planning solution is integrated with the current Broner Material and Production Planning tools. This will allow CSI to evaluate the stock coverage of current and confirmed slab inventories against the latest order book together with the trends in various future demand scenarios. This capability will improve decision-making capabilities in order scheduling and in slab acquisition policies.
The integration of Demand Planning with Production Planning will also improve CSI's tactical planning decisions when balancing capacity planning with order book management.
New integrated reporting tools will improve CSI's internal collaboration by providing transparency of the current supply/demand status to CSI management and to the Sales, Production Control and Procurement departments.

The implementation of Demand Modeller commenced in October 2007 and the project is estimated to take 6-8 months to execute.

This new application will complement existing Broner Production Planner, Production Scheduler and Material Planner modules, which California Steel has been successfully using for the last decade.

Manny Lara, Production Planning Manager at California Steel, said, "After a scrutinised analysis of existing supply processes, we realised that we need to introduce additional functionality in order to meet diverse changes arising in the slab supply market. Broner Demand Modeller closely met our requirements because it allows forecast scenarios to be evaluated against slab supply and production capacity."

About California Steel Industries

California Steel Industries is the leading producer of flat-rolled steel in the Western United States, with five different product lines: hot-rolled; cold-rolled and galvanised sheet and electric resistance welded pipe. CSI produces approximately 2 million tons per annum of finished product, from slabs purchased from around the world. CSI is owned by JFE Steel Corporation of Japan and Vale of Brazil.