Section 16.4. ESA in action: Arcelor

16.4. ESA in action: Arcelor

One company actively using Java in its ESA implementation is Arcelor, and specifically its subsidiary, Profilarbed. Arcelor is one of the world's leading manufacturers of steel products for the automotive, construction, household appliance, and packaging industries. Formed in February 2002 by the merger of three steelmaking companies, Aceralia, Arbed, and Usinor, today Arcelor has annual revenues of 30 billion euros, with 95,000 employees in more than 60 countries producing 47 million tons of steel each year. Profilarbed is a subsidiary within Arcelor's portfolio of companies focused on the manufacture of steel sections and sheet piles for the construction industry. Profilarbed's IT department has created its own roadmap for the adoption of ESA with the goal being the rapid deployment of new services and composite applications in the pursuit of more flexible and efficient operations.

Profilarbed built its current IT landscape using SAP R/3 as the Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) foundation, and it chose SAP NetWeaver as the platform for creating and recombining services. Profilarbed has already realized 20 years' worth of cost and efficiency advantages from its SAP applications and sees ESA as the gradual, natural extension of its investment. The company has already begun identifying and building the necessary services for the composite applications it envisions building in the next few years. The short-term goal is to abstract and write services in ABAP, call them using RFCs, and combine them into composite applications using Java. Additional services will be acquired from SAP. From this central pool of shared enterprise services overseen by IT, business analysts working in various departments will be given the provenance to compose applications as needed in order to streamline and consolidate existing systems and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

For now, Profilarbed manually codes these composites in Java, which runs on SAP NetWeaver Application Server (SAP NetWeaver AS). Arcelor is waiting for next-generation modeling tools like the SAP Composite Application Framework (SAP CAF) to appear in SAP NetWeaver, which it expects will generate composite applications more easily and rapidly than its current hand-coded efforts. In the meantime, Profilarbed has begun grappling with the challenge of retraining its IT staff and prospective business analysts to think of applications as modular, object-oriented collections of services, which was one reason why Profilarbed chose Java as its development language. Not coincidentally, the company expects to reduce the time spent retraining staff further down the adoption path.

One of Profilarbed's first enterprise-services-based projects was the creation of a B2B purchase order entry application connecting several of its largest clients' systems to Profilarbed's own SAP R/3. Figure 16-26 shows Profilarbed's B2B project.

Figure 16-26. Profilarbed's B2B project

The order arrives via an XML message containing data written in ESIDEL, the European Steel Industry Data Exchange Language created by Eurofer, the European Confederation of Iron and Steel Industries. A procession of services orchestrated on SAP NetWeaver AS, validates, maps, and transforms the XML message into an IDOC used by SAP R/3. For Master Data Management (MDM) purposes, a second IDOC is created to reconcile the order with Profilarbed's central system before the order is finally placed.

The five services orchestrating preprocessing in Figure 16-26 are examples of the services Profilarbed is already building and of which it intends to build many more.