Corus is an international metals company, providing steel products and services to customers worldwide. As part of a global strategic initiative to reduce IT costs and improve profitability, it has launched a major program of IT rationalization.
The primary objective was to significantly reduce the Total Cost of Ownership of Corus UK’s highly complex legacy IS and IT landscape. Corus wanted to standardize back-office operational business processes in Finance, Procurement and Plant Maintenance.
The Solution
The solution was predicated on the rationalization and retirement of legacy processes, integration approach and IS/IT technologies by introducing a Common Application Backbone based on SAP. This is supported by a service-oriented enterprise architecture and the implementation of an enterprise integration framework.
Using Capgemini’s Integrated Architecture Framework (IAF) approach, the target services architecture was conceived, designed and validated to reflect the tobe business and IS/IT architecture.
Selected methods, architectural views and strategic frameworks were then developed from the architecture to support the SAP implementation and to help plan and de-risk the migration and decommissioning of the existing legacy platforms and associated interfaces.
To remove the incumbent costly and highly complex integration challenge, the services architecture was used to design the Corus enterprise integration framework, which was then deployed using IBM Websphere and SAP XI technologies.
The Result
The enterprise services architecture is now a key point of reference for Corus UK’s business and IS/IT architecture and design; it enables traceability and visibility of the end-to-end business and technical operation of Corus UK’s back office systems including Finance, Procurement and Plant Maintenance.
The new enterprise integration framework is a strategic platform for future integration and the model for replacing existing point to point legacy interfaces.
How Corus and Capgemini Worked Together
Corus UK launched a strategic initiative to reduce IT costs and improve profitability. Sponsored by the Corus CIO and Architecture & Standards Manager, Capgemini enterprise architects collaborated with senior stakeholders at Corus (business and IT) to define and validate the services and logical architecture of the target Corus business and IS/IT operation for selected core functions. Capgemini’s Integrated Architecture Framework (IAF) was used as the method and framework to plan, develop and communicate the enterprise services architecture.
The Capgemini architecture team worked with their Outsourcing colleagues, who were incumbent as the Corus IT Service Delivery Partner to accelerate the capture and review of the current state of the highly complex end-to-end technology landscape of Corus UK.
The architecture team also worked alongside the Capgemini SAP functional and technical teams to ensure that the implemented SAP solution was aligned to the enterprise services architecture. This was also used as the model to ensure that the enterprise integration framework was designed and built based on the same services model.
The architecture has subsequently been further exploited by Corus to assist in the analysis and design of a solution for shared services in Finance. To enable Corus UK to take on ownership and further leverage the services architecture, Capgemini designed and conducted a training and ongoing coaching program to establish the enterprise architecture competencies that now form the Enterprise Architecture function at Corus.
Architecture Benefits
The Architecture provides detailed visibility and full transparency of Corus UK’s business and technology landscape for the back office. The landscape is modelled both in its current and futures states, and represents an integrated framework and adaptive point of reference to plan and manage change within Corus.
Together with the SAP implementation, the solution enables Corus to adopt leading practice business processes deployed on SAP. Expensive old systems that required complex integration are finally being replaced.
The services architecture is critical for future strategic and enterprise solution design alignment at Corus. This is particularly relevant as Corus’ SAP Application Backbone extends to deployment of SAP’s Netweaver stack alongside SAP’s Enterprise Services Architecture design and development approach.
Of critical significance, the architecture helps strategic opportunities across all dimensions of Corus to surface. This ensures that future solutions are aligned to prevailing business needs and IT principles via design consistency and best practice.
