The digital transformation of John Cockerill

“A centralized data platform for even more performance.”

The John Cockerill group’s mission is to respond to the needs of its time, and is organized around six major business sectors to which the corporate sector must be added. This involves internally very significant technical and technological developments, for which return on investment is extremely important. Moreover, from a more financial perspective, having about a hundred legal entities requires CMI to maintain very close monitoring month by month and year by year. It was therefore essential to have systems that allow for this real-time monitoring.

The analytical aspect played a central role in this transformation because it is essential, that when you have data, you have to derive profit from it. To support them in the project, Talan (previously Micropole) played a dual role: on one hand, supporting CMI’s IT teams to bring all the competence and technological knowledge, but also supporting the business to bring the right way to exploit this technology and implement it to achieve the objectives.

The project

CMI is a group composed of more than a hundred entities. It is therefore necessary to consolidate the figures every month (budgets, forecasts, cash positions) for management. Previously, this process, even though it was well-established, was essentially manual with a lot of re-encoding. It was therefore necessary to move to the next stage and modernize the IT tools. Talan (previously Micropole) helped CMI to centralize all available data on a technological platform SAP, in order to gain automation, flexibility, consistency, transparency across all SAP and non-SAP entities combined.

The time that was previously required to manage these manual processes is now allocated to more relevant activities for the company, providing for significant time and cost reduction.

Why did we choose Talan (previously Micropole)?

Talan (previously Micropole) has a dual strength: on the one hand, it masters the technological platform we implement, SAP, and on the other, it has an excellent understanding of our business. — Gérard Purnode - CIO of the CMI Group