Progress in Bits and Bytes

2023 has kept the IT team busy. Between phishing attempts and equipment upgrades, there’s been a lot to tackle.

“I’m proud of the steps IT took this year to be true business partners,” Ram Balasubramanian, Chief Information Officer, said. “We restructured the team to allow us to focus on different needs.”

Some highlights in 2023 include:

• Began the Epicor implementation with the Peoria melt shop to take out manual work and processes, as well as bring operational visibility to supervisors and leadership.

• De-risked our legacy AS400 system by adding redundancies and moving HR activities away from the AS400.

• Implemented a customer relationship management tool to help the sales team with their processes and forecasting.

• Driving data analytics for sales and bringing consistent visibility of daily sales and shipments, driving detailed customer analytics to drive additional sales opportunities.

• Implemented tools to improve our cyber posture, to help educate associates on cyber risks and also implemented prevention and alerting tools to reduce cyber events.

Moving ahead, we expect the Epicor go-live to happen in Q1.

“We have a team focused on providing solutions to help the business be more agile and responsive,” Ram said. “I’m looking forward to making more progress in 2024.”