Oracle News Desk

Eaton Steel is relying on the Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Database and Oracle SOA Suite, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, to gain insight into its supply chain network and financial results, simplify transactions with its network of partners and help reduce costs by automating key business processes.

Using Oracle Financials, Eaton Steel gained a unified view of its financial performance and transactions across all six of its subsidiaries. As a result, the company has better insight into organizational performance and can consistently refine processes to improve results.

With Oracle Discrete Manufacturing, Eaton Steel is able to manage its entire steel production process, from heat-treating and sizing the material to work-in-process to cost and quality management. Additionally, the company relies on Oracle to automatically transfer engineering specifications into production items, bills of material, and routing.

Building on its successful implementation of the Oracle E-Business Suite, Eaton Steel used Oracle SOA Suite to develop a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that simplifies EDI transactions with the company’s wide range of business partners and helps automate the business processes around those transactions.

For example, prior to deploying the SOA, a processor in the company’s network had to call or fax Eaton Steel to notify them when a shipment had been received. The information then had to be entered into the system, and the process had to be repeated when the processor had shipped the steel.

Using Oracle SOA Suite, Eaton Steel is developing a series of Web Services based on easily reusable code that allows its subsidiaries and partners to call up a simple Web-based interface and quickly enter the relevant information, which will then be automatically routed into the Oracle E-Business Suite. This will enable Eaton Steel to automate business processes in multiple areas, such as purchase orders, invoices, and inventory management.

The service-oriented architecture is helping provide Eaton Steel’s business partners with a near-real-time and detailed view into inventory and production status. This helps eliminate several manual procedures, thereby reducing resources required to manage the process and the potential for error inherent in redundant data entry.

"Using Oracle SOA Suite to develop and integrate transactional Web services into Oracle E-Business Suite has simplified our processing and made it easier for our vendors, partners and internal employees to manage the process. Now, we can easily keep our inventory up to date and better understand the performance of our distributed manufacturing operation," said Joe Machak, Vice President of Information Technology, Eaton Steel.

eAlliance Corporation, a member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork, worked closely with Eaton Steel to implement the Oracle technology and applications.

"The promise of SOA delivered. It is our pleasure to work with a visionary customer like Eaton Steel to leverage the powerful tools in the Oracle SOA Suite to deliver integrated business processes that increase profits. I encourage other companies that make or ship something to investigate the use of SOA to automate their processes, connect disparate systems and provide better business information," said Ramesh Kumar, President, eAlliance Corporation.