Oracle Customer Case Study

POSCO Streamlines Decision-Making and Slashes

Data Extraction Times with Oracle

“With Oracle’s data warehousing solution, preparing

information to calculate monthly, quarterly, and yearly sales
and earnings figures now takes a single employee only 10
Pohang Iron & Steel Company
Seoul, Korea minutes compared to the efforts of 10 employees over six days
www.posco.co.kr previously. We call it ‘speed management’.” – In-Bong Lee,
Industry: Director of Process Innovation, POSCO
Industrial Manufacturing

Annual Revenue: Pohang Iron & Steel Company (POSCO) is one of the world’s
US$19 Billion largest steel producers with annual crude-steel production
Employees: capacity of 30 million tons and sales (FY2003) well in excess of
19,400 US$19 billion. Employing 19,400 people, the company makes hot
and cold-rolled steel products (plate steel, stainless steel, hot strip,
Oracle Products & Services: and wire rods) and serves customers in Asia, the Americas and
Oracle Data Warehouse· Europe.
Oracle Database·
In November 2004, POSCO finalized a technology project that
Oracle Discoverer
Oracle Express Server·
would consolidate its multiple enterprise data sources into a single
Oracle Express Object· data warehouse, breaking down organizational silos and allowing
Oracle Designer employees throughout the company to share enterprise
knowledge.
Key Benefits:
The technology project, part of the second phase of a mammoth
Broke down organizational silos
Process Innovation program, would extend the deployment of a
with single, company-wide data
warehouse recently implemented Oracle data warehouse solution to five
Provided access to company additional divisions: production; finance and accounting;
data to employees at all levels purchasing; energy and plant; and facility and equipment.
with customized interfaces·
Slashed data preparation and
The first phase of the Process Innovation program, which ended in
extraction times from days to June 2001, was highly successful. It involved the rollout of
minutes several new platforms, including the company’s enterprise
resource planning system (called POSPIA) and data warehousing
solutions in the sales, costings, investment, and human resources
divisions. These platforms were built on Oracle E-Business Suite.
The second phase of the program involved upgrading POSCO’s
legacy operating systems to the latest technology standards.

Copyright © 2005 Oracle. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. Published August 2005
 Oracle Customer Case Study

Management expectations for the project were high. The company

wanted to:

Improve business efficiency by providing real-time

information to support rapid decision-making
Unify and simplify access to POSCO’s enterprise systems by
consolidating data into a central data warehouse
Ensure the new system met the workflow requirements of
field workers

Why Oracle?
POSCO wanted a single data warehouse that would break down
organizational silos and permit company-wide data sharing. In the
first phase of the Process Innovation, POSCO had compared
Oracle solutions with competing products. It concluded that
Oracle Data Warehouse provided the power, flexibility, and
scalability required to place all company data on a single platform
in a format convenient for employees to access.
The success of the first-stage deployment had strengthened this
view. By breaking the Process Improvement program into bite-
sized chunks, Oracle consultants minimized errors and established
a highly stable enterprise resource planning and data warehousing
system that maximized efficiency and security.
“By working as a team with POSCO employees, Oracle ensured a
systematic and prompt deployment, validating our choice of the
company as vendor,” said In-Bong Lee, director of process
innovation, POSCO.

Faster Data Access, Better Decision-Making

A major reason for introducing the data warehouse was to replace
legacy systems that could not supply information swiftly enough
to meet management needs. The new platform led to major
improvements.
“With Oracle’s data warehousing solution, preparing information
to calculate monthly, quarterly, and yearly sales and earnings
figures now takes a single employee only 10 minutes compared to
the efforts of 10 employees over six days previously,” said Lee.

Copyright © 2005 Oracle. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. Published August 2005
 Oracle Customer Case Study

Designed For All Employees

POSCO wanted to ensure that the data warehouse would be
accessible by all employees with an easy-to-use interface. The
data warehousing was run alongside a plan to develop a single
enterprise portal to house the data. The project’s working group
included employees from each department from the beginning of
the project to ensure the new system met everyone’s needs.

Unified Company-Wide Data

Oracle provided a single platform where POSCO employees
could access all the company’s data. POSCO’s data warehouse is
connected to its enterprise resource planning system,
consolidating data formerly accessible only to pockets of
employees held in disparate legacy systems. The platform also
merges and standardizes key performance indicators using
metadata tags.

Future Plans
After deploying its Oracle data warehousing solution throughout
the company, POSCO began designing custom data analysis
features to suit employees in different roles, including data
mining, cleansing, profiling, and statistical tools. “Now that we
have complete access to data with our Oracle solution, we’re able
to move to the next stage of transforming raw facts into valuable
business intelligence,” said Lee.

Copyright © 2005 Oracle. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. Published August 2005