If only you had a research team devoted to the issues most important to you. Well, in some ways you do.

Each year, with direction from MSCI’s Research Committee, MSCI completes a research report on an issue critical to the success of metals service centers. We engage the sharpest university minds and the most diligent investigative reporters to produce a direct, succinct look at disruptive forces affecting your work.

2016 - Managing the Avalanche of Big Data and Digital Business Analytics

Futurists and Silicon Valley tech gurus often grope for superlatives when describing the “exponential” upward trend in the digitization of our society. It’s increasing, they say, not in a straight line, like so many 20th century advances, but in huge upward swoops. The world is fast becoming a vast grid of digitized data points. There are sensors in factory machines, algorithms shadowing our emails, cars that chatter away like village gossips, accessible profiles of you and me and your next-door neighbor on Facebook and LinkedIn, and much more. And it’s all getting connected.

Big Data, and its first cousins Information Analytics and the Internet of Things, are already revolutionizing processes and business models in advanced sectors of the metals industry. Clearly it is an opportune moment for metals service centers to look carefully at their business models and operations to adapt to this flood of new technology.

2015 - 3D Printing/Additive Manufacturing

People in the business call it Additive Manufacturing or AM, sometimes 3DP, but rarely 3-D printing. Whatever we call it AM looks more and more every day like a critical disruptor in some of the most profitable segments of the metals industry. It is a technology, or more accurately a group of them, that could well offer many service centers the opportunity to move from a price-sensitive, arbitrage-based commodity business model into more high-value, high margin, high growth sectors.

2014 - Cyber Security in the Metals Industry

Executives should understand the urgency of the modern cyber-security threats faced by their businesses and the need for information security in a networked environment with mobile devices, flash storage, and employee access to critical company information. This report provides an overview of the cyber-security threat in non-technical language and provides practical suggestions on how metals companies, led by knowledgeable executives, can protect themselves from security breaches and their aftermath.

2013 - Metals Industry Safety Practices

Safety is a moral imperative. Each of us wants to make sure our employees, our teammates return home in the same condition that they arrived in. This report examines the state of safety practices and program implementation in the metals industry.

2012 – LEAN Manufacturing

Operational excellence requires a mentality of continuous improvement. This report lays out the nature of LEAN techniques and tools and examines several examples of LEAN implementation in the metals industry

2011 – eCommerce

eCommerce has had positive impacts on reducing cost, improving efficiency, reducing errors and streamlining supply chains. This report examines other similar supply chains for successes and failures in implementing industry-wide eCommerce initiatives.