Sloss Industries

Sloss Industries, a subsidiary of Walters Industries, is a $1.5 billion enterprise with diversified holdings in the home building, metals, mining, and specialty chemicals industries. Sloss has sales of $150 million annually.

Sloss produces three major product groups: coke, specialty chemicals, and slag wool. Coke produced by the company falls into two categories: blast furnace coke for use by steel producers and foundry coke for use in automotive, agricultural and pipe foundries. Sloss' chemicals are produced principally for the chemical, plastics, rubber, automotive, and agricultural industries. Slag wool is used in acoustical ceiling products. Processed mineral fiber is used in friction materials, thermo-plastic molding compounds, adhesives, paints, and sealants.

Sloss operates 120 coke ovens and a slag wool plant at its main complex in Alabama. The company's chemical operations are located at two Alabama facilities. One chemical plant is right across from the Slag Wool plant and the other, called Arichem, is over 120 miles away from Birmingham in Ariton, Alabama.

Growth Strategy Requirements
For over 100 years, Sloss conducted business conservatively. As part of an aggressive growth plan to capture attention and market share, Sloss and its current management team decided to invest in technology. Through this IT investment and continued industry acquisitions, Sloss embarked on a plan to be the market leader in slag wool and a major force in specialty chemicals.

With the help of Arthur Andersen Consulting, SLOSS selected SSA's BPCS V6.0.04 software suite. An Oracle database running on an IBM AS/400 would replace their outdated non-integrated IBM Mainframe software system. In addition, Sloss implemented a solution for Output Management (Confirm) to meet stringent industry shipping and reporting standards.

The Output Management (Confirm) solution was comprised of electronic reporting functionality, including invoicing, invoice reprint, credit memo, credit memo reprint, debit memo, debit memo reprint, order acknowledgment, return material authorization, quote acknowledgment, and picking slip capabilities. Also, Sloss is ISO-9000 certified so they must maintain and track changes in their documents.

Benefits Realized
The new solution provided by SSA plus Output Management (Confirm) was critical in enabling Sloss to be successful in their growth strategy by providing more effective reporting and better decision making capabilities. In addition, manufacturing management capabilities were added - functionality that was not part of the legacy system.

With the new system's enhanced functionality, Sloss has gained better control in areas of planning, inventory, quality, regulatory requirements, lab analysis and reporting requirements, and support for the system integration needs.

Output Management (Confirm)'s role within Sloss' system is to query the item master hazard codes to generate automatically a correct set of shipping documents when ordering chemicals. The system allows Sloss to order chemicals from most dangerous to least. The Output Management solution complements BPCS, as BPCS does not have the specific functionality for storing chemical analysis information or the MSDS documents.

Output Management contains custom programs to allow for the transfer of this information from type-written files and word documents into SLOSS' Oracle database. By having it in a database, Sloss is able to track documents to meet ISO standards and it permits Output Management to generate automatically these essential documents at the time of shipping. Further, Sloss is able to route documents to remote sites in Indiana and Northern Alabama, improving productivity and efficiency throughout the organization.