Impol Video

Impol is an international company and leading manufacturer of extruded aluminium products all over the world.

Video Transcript

Executive Director for Purchasing & Risk Management
Impol

Impol is an international company and leading manufacturer of extruded aluminium products all over the world. Our most important product groups are sheets, strips, cut blanks, foils, extruded profiles, bars and tubes for customers like car industry, construction, electro industry and many other manufacturers.

To operate successfully in the future it is essential to implement a future-proofed risk management system to stabilize our business processes. The main risk is the constantly increasing Aluminium price volatility on the London Metal Exchange. Business success is depending upon favourable LME price movements and we have to create a business environment which can be controlled and commanded by us.

We didn´t find any standart IT solution which could be integrated in our existing ERP system. This led us to IBM because SOA has become today´s premier method to attain business agility through the reuse of a company´s current IT assets and integration processes. And as IBM is market leader in SOA we therefore know that they offer the right product strategy!
Alcad our IT-business partner developed a risk managment system. Alcad and IBM described the process with WebSphere Business Modeler. In the course of optimizing and simulating this process we saw the high flexibility of IBM WebSphere and we knew why IBM is market leader.
A key tool was also the WebSphere Integration developer which enabels us to transform many of the existing IT assets into highly efficient, flexible and reuseable services. Having also WebSphere Process Server in place, it is very easy to quickly deploy those services enterprise wide! And for the first time we now are able to monitor the process flows in real-time with IBM WebSphere Business Monitor, immediately react on process gaps and use this information as input for better strategic decisions and planning.
If you want to be successful in the metal industry, it is not enough just to be good at buying raw materials and selling your products to customers. You have to combine those basic skills with the proper use of futures, hedging and options tools and other finacial instruments that are available through the London Metal Exchange.

IBM´s WebSphere technology with it´s maximum of investment protection was the right decision to achieve a system which provides reliable, complete and manageable information together with interactions and high reliabel transactions. This gives us the guarantee to run the business as a globally intergated company.
SOA improves visibility into business operations, integrates historically separate systems and offers new services for customers without having to worry about the underlying IT infrastructure.

In the next two or three years we will extend SOA functionality at Impol by implementing more services and achieve company wide integration of SOA. IBM showed us a way of getting high Return on Investment out in a very short time. And because of our need of continuous scalability, but also cost savings, we see IBM as the strategic partner!