Ugine & ALZ, a subsidiary of Arcelor group, is the second-largest European supplier of stainless steel.
With 3,300 collaborators based in three production and two R&D centers, Ugine & ALZ generated revenues of 1,233 million € in 2000 while producing 740 000 tons of steel.

In 1999, the data processing responsibilities of the group were fully separated, which resulted in the creation of two entities, Usinor TI (Network / Exploitation) and Usinor SI (Research / Development).

Paseo's contribution

"We have chosen Paseo to manage the data warehouse feed of the company. We appreciate the open archi-tecture and flexibility of the software with respect to automation, monitoring and recovery/restart functionality. . It is a complete answer our IT system process problems."
Stéphane Moris, Franck Goutheraud - Usinor TI

Datawarehouses Alimentation

All sales, accounting and production information, are sent as ASCII files via Pelican from an MVS main-frame. Next they are automatically formatted for input to eight SQL Server data warehouses . The data is are then available for Business Objects queries.

This information, which is concerned with all func-tional domains of the group, has a critical level be-cause it directly influences decision making, particularly at the beginning of the working day. The reliabil-ity, robustness and the punctuality of the dissemina-tion process is therefore essential.

Ugine & ALZ previously worked with script commands without any supervision or recovery/restart.

With the increase in both the volume and criticality of the data's it was obviously very important to find a software solution that could manage the data warehouses and supervise all execution and transfers.

Paseo was chosen for its supervision and recov-ery/restart functionality. More than 400 scenarios are running to supply the eight group data warehouses. Each scenario is dedicated to a particular Business Objects universe.

The data feed process previously required one per-son working full-time. Today it requires simply a daily check of scenario status. The Paseo interface is graphic and provides an easy view for supervising the running processes.

Robustness is also improved with custom loop func-tionality that is incident-driven. In case of failure dur-ing the file transfer, Paseo will re-try the transfer a fixed number of times, before witching to an alternate method gracefully degrading. This function avoids unnecessary delay of the information dissemination.

In addition, Paseo supervises the data warehouse host servers to ensure they are online and running correctly.