BUSINESS

Promoting digital transformation throughout the steel industry

Metal One perceives diverse industrial and social issues as issues for the steel industry as a whole.
We promote digital transformation while confronting these issues head-on.
By creating sustainable supply chains and offering new capabilities as a trading company, we will continue to provide various digital solutions.

Metal X®

Employing expertise developed through our wide-ranging involvement in automotive industry supply chains, Metal One jointly developed Metal X®—a digital platform that promotes digital transformation and drives sustainable supply chains—with IBM Japan, Ltd., offering it to customers from April 2023. By treating the companies involved in automotive industry distribution channels as a single entity and sharing data through the same system, Metal X® enables efficient and sustainable operation. It includes features such as automatic calculation of the required steel material based on parts list information, ranging from automotive components to steel materials, as well as the production schedules of automotive manufacturers. We plan to steadily expand our services.

Metal X® Service

Issues to address with Metal X®

Agility in relation to markets

  • Responding to shorter product life cycles, such as first anniversary edition car models (expanded inventory risk)

Supply chain resilience

  • Difficulty of (uncertainty in) reading supply and demand balances due to demand and price fluctuations and the adoption of new materials, leading to distribution network-wide shortages of items and excess inventory
  • Flexibly responds to natural disasters, pandemics, and geopolitical risks

Carbon neutrality
and the circular economy

  • Includes the regulations of individual countries and their various investments in green transformation designed to achieve carbon neutrality; environment, social and governance investment trends; and the changing perceptions of consumers
  • Scope 3 data collection, disclosure of the carbon footprints of products, and actions taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Optimize human resource allocation in response to labor force shortages

  • Adopt labor-saving operations in manufacturing sites and distribution to allow the transfer of personnel from non-competitive to competitive sectors (high-value-added operations)

Metal X®capabilities

Multi-Level BOMs

This service involves maintaining cross-corporate, multi-level BOM information linking everything from base materials to parts.
Having companies that use our Metal X platform provide parts lists and materials information makes it possible to visualize information in tree structures, spanning everything from base materials to parts—things that were previously compartmentalized.

Multi-level BOM depiction
Multi-level BOM depiction
You can slide horizontally

Note: The parts numbers, base materials codes and specifications are all examples.

Monthly required steel materials amount calculation service

This service automatically calculates the amounts of steel materials that must be ordered from steel manufacturers monthly (unofficial notification of steel materials required), based on multi-level BOMs and production plan information from car manufacturers.
This renders existing tasks at car and parts manufacturers related to creating unofficial notifications unnecessary. It also simplifies the tasks of calculating the amounts of base materials that trading companies and steel service centers need, based on unofficial notifications about steel materials required that were collected from multiple customers.

Monthly required steel materials amount calculation service
(service launched in April 2023)
Monthly required steel materials amount calculation service(service launched in April 2023)
You can slide horizontally

Daily Order and Delivery Management

Our daily order and delivery management service simplifies the handling of daily orders placed and received, as well as confirming the status of shipments and deliveries across supply chains. It has the following two primary capabilities:

  • Efficiently places new orders and change orders with companies and steel service centers
  • Centrally manages shipment scheduling in response to orders and delivery performance

These capabilities enable efficient communication, making it possible for all parties (including subcontractors) placing and receiving orders to confirm order and shipping information in real time.

Daily order and delivery management service
(service launched in August 2024)
Daily order and delivery management service (service launched in August 2024)

Metal X UP

Metal X UP is Metal One’s digital platform that enhances efficiency and sophistication, as well as cutting communications costs, throughout the entire steel distribution network. At the beginning of 2023, we began providing Metal X UP for operations within the steel plate sector, and later for all product categories and sectors in the steel industry.
We used agile development methodology to develop Metal X UP, calling on the cooperation of multiple business partners and placing a priority on their operations and convenience. Metal X UP has two main capabilities:
1) Digitalizing analog supply chain information, starting with porting analog mill certificate to electronic forms
2) Enhancing the efficiency and advancement of business operations and communication, through such things as automated reconciliation of accounts receivable and payable and status management
We will continue to expand and improve the Metal X UP platform’s capabilities to ensure that it resolves user issues, and strive to provide services that apply to all product types so that we can support as many business partners as possible.

Metal X UP diagram

Issues we will be taking on with Metal X UP

Labor shortages

Japan is now confronting issues such as labor shortages and carbon neutrality. Although coping with these issues is an urgent task for the steel distribution industry, communication between trading companies and customers—handled via phone, fax and email—still involves a lot of paper and overly complex and inefficient operations. We developed Metal X UP as a response to these issues.

Going paperless

Our core goal is to replace business practices based on paper with electronic methods.

Metal X UP capabilities

Metal X UP enables users—trading companies, wholesalers, processors, and other companies involved in steel distribution—to communicate and exchange documents and data through the platform. The operations Metal X UP covers include electronic delivery of mill certificates, digital invoices, accounts receivable and payable reconciliation, confirmation of steel delivery plan timelines, requests and responses using chat, and order history confirmation. We will make continuous improvements to the user interface and experience, striving to provide the greatest convenience possible to our business partners, digitalize the entire steel industry, and contributing to resolve industry issues. We will also be presenting Metal X UP as a solution to other companies, as well as linking to systems developed by other companies.