4 takeaways from our annual metals technology survey

Overall, the metals industry’s view on these technologies is moving past the “pilot” or “test” program phase and into multiple applications across all parts of the business. All of those technologies have one thing in common: They’re ultimately applied in service of getting better data – whether private and proprietary, or publicly available – and analyzing that data to reveal deeper insights.

According to 2020 survey participants, their three biggest business intelligence and data analysis challenges were standardization of data (33%), identifying the best metrics and key performance indicators (21%), and the lack of a unified organizational data strategy (19%). 

As companies invest in more technologies that generate more data, they need to have an established data management plan from the beginning – as well as a willingness to modify that plan in response to unexpected challenges.

Formulating a data strategy starts with determining what questions you are trying to answer when you analyze your data and figuring out what information is most critical for your business. It also entails figuring out the best way to bring all that information, quickly, into a single, centralized place and then determining the best ways to present and share that information in different ways for different audiences.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and other core technology solutions still make up a big part of metals companies’ overall technology investment. But the trend line from our metals technology surveys over the past few years shows spending in this area is leveling off. For instance, only 52% of respondents to the most recent survey reported plans to make ERP upgrades or implementations in 2020, a moderate decline from prior years.

Two trends are driving this. First, within the metals industry, many companies’ leaders have started to think about ERP as more of a continuous improvement initiative. When ERP systems live in the cloud and operate on a software-as-a-service model, they’re continually being updated.

The other trend is playing out among the providers of ERP solutions. Some of these large software companies are now thinking of the technology not so much as “ERP” but rather as a collection of applications, each of which addresses specific business processes. Essentially, developers are now trying to think of and build their solutions in terms of what the end users actually do, such as sales, supply chain, finance, and customer service, rather than creating a comprehensive software platform that might have a lot of features users don’t need.

Offering customers online platforms for ordering and purchasing is no longer a means of differentiation. Increasingly, it’s just the cost of doing business.

Right now, though, a lot of metals companies are still in the early phases of e-commerce. Many are just now getting a customer portal online, for instance. In the 2020 survey, almost half of respondents said they were either already offering direct online sales or were planning to do so sometime within the next three years.

Metals companies that are leading the way in this space will continue exploring how they can grow their existing customer relationships and build new customer relationships through these online and digital channels. To do that, they won’t just replicate the previous experience in an online platform. They’ll improve upon that by asking questions like, “How can this experience be new and better?” and “What does the digital technology enable you to do that you can’t do when you’re on the phone with customers?”