Technical Data Sheet
Client: Ternium
Service: Business process automation
Industry: Metallurgical
Technology: BPMS Qflow, web portal
This project implements a portal for the company’s business processes, including their definition, automation and management.
Ternium uses Qflow in several countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, the United States and Uruguay. The workload is of 8 million started flows and approximately 70.000 users.
Qflow has been part of Ternium for 20 years, starting its process with Qflow version 2 to the currently with Qflow 3.3. Nowadays, we are working on a new migration to version 5.
Challenge
The client defined the following non-functional requirements to be met by the system:
Reliability:
• Availability: Since the processes running on the system are critical to the client, its downtime must be minimized as much as possible.
• Fault tolerance: Given the number of external Qflow processes built-in, it must be possible to handle system errors with automatic or manual retries.
• Recovery capacity: It must be possible to recover the data in case of system interruption or failure.
Security:
• Confidentiality: A system user can only access the processes, trays, tasks, tools and sites for which having permission.
• Integrity: A user can only respond to or modify tasks or parameters for which having permission.
• Non-repudiation: Responses to tasks and changes to system parameters are
associated with the user who answered or modified them. The user cannot change this information.
• Authenticity: Users must authenticate themselves in the system to perform any actions.
Solution
Qflow engine is used through a portal called NSW (New Workflow System) accessed by users, based on an ASP.NET MVC web application that stores their information in a SQL Server.
The company has two servers: North (USA, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil) and South (Argentina and Uruguay), with approximately 1 Tera and 200 Gb servers for database engines, respectively.
An internal portal was implemented for company management, which allows for creating tenders, managing users and carrying out bidding processes.
The processes automated in Qflow BPMS are integrated into the NSW Portal to manage all user processes, as well as with other company platforms and services, such as IT security and infrastructure.
Qflow is used in all areas of Ternium: Quality, Supplies, IT Security, Commercial, Travel, Human Resources, Investments, Subsidiaries, Credits and many others.
Today there are 100 different workflows, each with a specific purpose, on the North server and more than 30 on the South server.