Aleris selects Brady

Brady plc, headquartered in London, has announced that Aleris, with global headquarters in Cleveland, has selected its cloud-based solution to manage its global metal hedging and risk management.

Aleris is a global leader in the manufacture and sale of aluminum rolled products, with 14 facilities in three geographically aligned business units in North America, Europe and China, producing rolled aluminum sheet, plate and fabricated products for various industries.

The Brady solution enables Aleris to consolidate its global metal hedging across its operations in the U.S., Europe and China. In addition, Aleris is able to centrally manage and analyze its risk exposure and report on the gains/losses of its operations regionally as well as globally. The solution enables month end reporting to be completed in near real time, which is particularly critical in times of high price volatility, Brady says.

Erik Serio, vice president of risk at Aleris, says, “Key to our business is customer satisfaction, and Brady, as market leader in metals risk management software, offers us the reassurance that we can protect our customers better, through the flexibility we can offer in our pricing contracts. Many of our customers, particularly in the automotive sector, request pricing terms that would be difficult to manage without Brady’s risk management solution.”

Regarding Aleris’s decision to deploy the solution in the cloud, Graham Smith, global it director of Aleris, says, “The decision to select cloud deployment was strategic, as it provides a scalable environment which enables us to react in a timely way to business growth demands. To date, the decision has proven highly successful, and we expect the investment to pay for itself in a very short time period. Migrating to Brady’s Cloud environment allows our IT (information technology) department to be more agile and cost effective by shifting resources to other value-added initiatives, all while maintaining confidence in Brady’s management of the solution.”

Gavin Lavelle, CEO of Brady plc, says, “Brady is universally acclaimed as the leading provider of software to the global metals market and we are delighted that Aleris recognizes the value of entrusting Brady to manage its hedging and risk requirements. The return on investment and scalability benefits are two of the key reasons why more than 50 percent of the new business we won last year was for cloud-based solutions. We are delighted that Aleris is already enjoying these benefits.”