Providing services to steel mills and mines around the world can call for real-world, heavy lifting. So when Phoenix Global decided it was time for digital transformation as new leadership took the helm, it needed a fresh plan to embrace the cloud.
Jeff Suellentrop, chief information and technology officer for Phoenix Global, says the company works with some 17 steel mill sites in the US and abroad, offering slag remediation and metals recovery. “We operate all the heavy equipment, large loaders, dump trucks and basically all the heavy equipment in the steel mill,” he says. “We help process the byproduct of slags.”
Slag is the byproduct of steelmaking, in which impurities are removed from the metal. Suellentrop says his company works with slag to help reclaim precious metals to return to the steelmaking process. The part of the byproduct not returned to steelmaking gets crushed and sold to construction and other industrial agencies. “It’s a very renewable process,” he says.
Removing the Weight of Legacy Tech
Servicing steel mills is Phoenix Global’s main business, Suellentrop says, with contracts that can last from five through 20 years. “It’s a fairly unique business, fairly complex compared to traditional order-to-cash type of process.
That includes very large asset purchases at the onset with tens of millions of dollars spent on equipment to initiate a contract, he says. “We manage all that equipment, all the personnel, and we also maintenance all that equipment.”
This all requires a fairly long selling process, with each site built independently. Phoenix Global had a legacy ERP system in place, Suellentrop says, but the unique needs of the sites led to fragmented data that was not very integrated. “Our goal was to get what we call activity-based management, near real-time activity-based management,” he says.
The company wanted to start fresh, jettison all the tech debt, and process debt to have a fully integrated, modernized organization. “We’ve replaced every technology in the company in the last two years,” Suellentrop says.
Unfettered by the Cloud
The core of that change, he says, was cloud-based SAP ERP software, for all of Phoenix Global’s finance, purchasing, processing tech, supply chain, contract management, plans, and telematics. Phoenix Global tapped Syntax Systems to transition to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
Suellentrop says his company is still deploying SAP at its sites, working toward 100% deployment, which will include mobile assets such as connecting loaders and dump trucks. “You can imagine all the telematics data, hours, fuel consumption,” he says. The system includes connecting some 1,700 associates around the world, integrating data, inventory, and managing maintenance shops through SAP. “We’ve taken out all of the hand offs; it’s all automated,” Suellentrop says. “We’ve literally taken days out of the turn-around time and driven up utilization of the equipment, saved millions of dollars on inventory.”
Maintenance, for example, has been streamlined to let technicians work directly through SAP to order repair parts that would be available that same day. “It’s a fairly high volume of data when it comes to all the information around the assets, asset maintenance, and then obviously tracking of all the different activities and resources,” he says. “Our goal with activity-based management basically is to see near real-time P&L by site to allow us to make near real-time decisions which help us service our customer better.”
In prior years, Phoenix Global saw spot implementations of new solutions for certain needs. After Suellentrop joined the company in March 2023, he was asked to architect the complete digital overhaul and digital transformation for the company. “I’m responsible, from the executive team, for that digital transformation and beginning this activity-based management,” he says. “Digital to me is really delivering it at the speed of business and creating a force multiplier. We literally changed every technology, jettisoned almost all of the legacy processes, and displaced them with best practices.”
That allowed Phoenix Global to get rid of unintegrated and poor processes, Suellentrop says, and leapfrog to best practices. “More importantly, it allowed us to standardize the whole data set,” he says, which meant not much data grooming was needed, quickening its use with AI. “We basically took out a whole challenge with deploying AI.”
New Leadership, New Strategy
Suellentrop joined Phoenix Global as it emerged from a reorganization, which he says gave the company the chance to start fresh with a new leadership team that had a goal of driving improvements across the board. That included the adoption of AI and a reimagining of the business model. “The steel industry has not embraced digital quite at the pace of some other industries,” he says.
The transformation plan aimed for increased safety, profitability, and efficiency. “We went into this with very distinct outcomes, how we saw this business running in the future, and then we basically align the technology to deliver those outcomes,” Suellentrop says. “I can’t stress the importance of that enough, because we had a very clear vision from the leadership team … it takes immense sponsorship, obviously, to jettison all old processes and go to best practices.”
That type of change management, he says, included telling staff that processes they followed day to day, perhaps for as long as 15 years, would change. This included digitizing everything, Suellentrop says, including analog records, even for operators driving trucks. “We got rid of all the paper and pencils,” he says. “We’ve deployed tablets; we automated so they didn’t have to enter some things. We want to minimize the human data entry.”
Maintenance technicians now use tablets, he says, which allows them to manage work orders, order parts, and plan their workloads.
Phoenix Global plans to finish deploying the new system and operating model in the US this year with international sites to follow in 2026, Suellentrop says. “We’re doing financial planning. We have several new AI value-adders that we’re layering on this year in the plants that are deployed … we can hyper tune our processes and our profitability because we’ve got a much higher level of detail.”