Rotherham-based Brinsworth Strip Mills, a unit of Corus' Special Strip Business Unit, has signed a GBP 300,000 contract to implement SSI's TROPOS ERP solution.

Rotherham-based Brinsworth Strip Mills, a unit of Corus' Special Strip Business Unit, has signed a contract to implement SSI's TROPOS ERP solution. The project, which covers 70 TROPOS user licences and is worth approximately GBP 300,000, is expected to go live in June 2002. SSI defeated vendors such as Mapics, Geac and Ross to win the contract.

Brinsworth operates largely in a short lead-time, make to order environment, and company bosses see the TROPOS project as vital in their drive to deliver the best customer service at competitive prices.

'TROPOS will give us better visibility of our supply chain,' says Corus business systems manager Joe Thomson.

'SSI's people were the clinching factor; they understood the mills and metals sector, and that gave us great confidence.

We expect to improve our quality of service as a result of the project - we need accurate and up to date information and TROPOS enables this' SSI MD Trevor Lewis says: 'We're delighted to have agreed this deal with Corus, which demonstrates the class-leading functionality of TROPOS in the mills and metals market.

For Corus, we shall be implementing two of the most advanced parts of our solution - shopfloor to top floor integration, and attribute-based manufacturing.' 'Attribute-based manufacturing is crucial,' says Corus' Thomson.

'Much of our planning and costing is based around physical attributes - such as the changing dimensions of our products during rolling and finishing - so this functionality is central to our solution'