How RHI Magnesita Is Unlocking Value Through Integrated Planning with o9

RHI Magnesita operates one of the most complex, vertically-integrated supply chains in heavy industry, shaped by years of acquisition-led expansion. Its products are also mission critical to its customers. Refractories keep large kilns, furnaces, and industrial plants running worldwide. For these customers, supply reliability is table stakes.

At the Go&See event in Vienna, co-hosted by o9, EFESO, and RHI Magnesita at the company’s headquarters, more than 70 planning leaders gathered for a firsthand look at RHIM’s digital supply chain planning transformation with o9 Solutions. 

For attendees, it was a unique opportunity to hear leaders at a large global enterprise speak candidly about the learnings behind the transformation, the redesign of its operating model, the progress achieved to date, and the value across inventory, service performance, and planning productivity.

Why transform, and why o9?

RHI Magnesita's products sit at the heart of some of the world's most demanding industrial processes—steel, cement, glass, and non-ferrous metals—industries that form the backbone of modern infrastructure and manufacturing.

The stakes could hardly be higher. Much like a single faulty component can halt an entire automotive assembly line, the failure of one refractory element can bring a complex, capital-intensive operation to a standstill. For RHI Magnesita's customers, reliability is a prerequisite.

Meeting that standard, however, is anything but simple. Global sourcing, multi-plant production, and thousands of SKUs that must arrive at customer sites at the precise moment of installation create a supply chain of extraordinary complexity.

It was this challenge—the need to deliver unfailing precision at industrial scale—that shaped RHI Magnesita's transformation strategy, built around four primary levers:

1. Inventory

RHI Magnesita manages a highly complex global footprint, serving more than 250,000 SKUs across 10,000 customer locations through a network of 67 production sites and over 250 warehouses worldwide. The company's inventory peaked at €1.2 billion several years ago and has since been reduced to approximately €1.0 billion. The long-term objective is to continue freeing up working capital while maintaining the strategic balance required to deliver consistently high service levels to customers.

2. Structural efficiency

Operating at this level of complexity makes the risks of fragmented systems, disjointed processes, and manual buffers simply too great. The objective is to fundamentally redesign how planning work is performed. That means connecting silos and shifting teams away from rebuilding spreadsheets and reconciling data, toward managing exceptions, improving service performance, and making higher-value decisions.

3. Supply resilience as a strategic offering

RHI Magnesita is shifting from a product-centric model to one that contractually commits to supply continuity and resilience. In an increasingly volatile global landscape, this capability has become a distinct strategic differentiator.

4. Sustainability as a competitive advantage

The ambition extends beyond compliance. By embedding circular economy principles into supply chain planning, RHI Magnesita aims to reduce CO₂ emissions and build greater regional self-sufficiency. The goal is to turn sustainability from a reporting obligation into a source of operational and commercial advantage.

Each of these levers demanded a planning platform capable of operating at genuine enterprise scale, integrating across a fragmented global network, and adapting as the business model evolved. That requirement shaped the technology decision as much as any other factor.

RHI Magnesita adopted a best-of-breed architecture, positioning o9 as its core end-to-end planning platform. The choice was deliberate. As leadership put it, o9 was "the only technology capable of combining the maturity required to meet our demanding standards with true end-to-end integration, while maintaining the adaptability to evolve alongside our business model."

What’s changed in planning since implementation?

As the day progressed, RHI Magnesita walked attendees through how planning actually works today inside the o9 platform and what has materially changed since implementation.

More granular, system-based forecasts

Demand planning used to be done at aggregated levels and now operates at SKU level with statistical and machine learning-based forecasting.

Forecast Value Add as a key behavioral change

The system now guides planners and sales teams on where intervention improves accuracy and where it simply introduces bias. As one leader put it, “If you’re touching a line where you cannot add any value, you’re just adding bias.”

Automated supply plan generation to enable forward-looking scenario planning

Once a consensus demand plan is established, the supply plan is automatically generated across sites and geographies, respecting capacity and material constraints. Replenishment and feasibility views have replaced hundreds of localized spreadsheets, creating a single, standardized approach across regions.As a result, the role of the planner has fundamentally shifted. With this foundation in place, teams can focus on identifying key bottlenecks, resolving exceptions, and proactively evaluating scenarios rather than rebuilding plans manually. As another leader explained, “Our planners are moving away from creating plans from scratch towards managing exceptions and solving late and short alerts.”

Order promising

Order promising has also been integrated into the same planning backbone rather than remaining a local ERP function. Instead of quoting static lead times, the company now uses network-wide order promising and prioritization based on service tiers and value chains. "For the question of 'what is the lead time?' you should never give a standard answer. There is no single lead time. We now give a tailored lead time based on an analysis of the order, the location, and the current constraints in our supply chain," another executive remarked.

At the same time, leadership emphasized the need for discipline. Real-time visibility is critical, but real-time replanning is not always the answer. Full data integration enables transparency, yet frozen horizons and governance guardrails are necessary to prevent noise from cascading through the system.

The goal, in other words, is not speed for its own sake, but controlled agility anchored in a single planning backbone.

The lessons learned

The day concluded with a reflection on the key lessons learned and the shared success factors behind large-scale planning transformations.

• People and adoption carry the greatest weight. The team invested deliberately in change management, establishing a global network of more than 70 key users who act as local ambassadors and first-line support. They complemented this with regular pulse checks to assess each region’s position on the adoption curve, alongside targeted one-on-one coaching and retraining wherever resistance or confusion emerged.
• Build trust by generating quick wins and scale with speed. Momentum is critical. Large-scale transformations demand early, tangible results to build credibility, and they must scale quickly to sustain belief. If organizations remain too long in the "crawl" or "walk" phase, or are asked to wait too long for impact, trust fades and energy dissipates.
• One team mindset. As one executive noted, there came a point when you could walk into a meeting room and “no longer tell who belonged to which company.”
• A Global Supply Chain Center of Excellence to drive standardization and speed. The Center of Excellence was established to drive standardization and accelerate execution. Clear milestones and a global template prevented scope drift and kept the program on track. Regional key-user structures provided day-to-day support and feedback, while a continuous improvement backlog ensured the global template evolved to incorporate critical usability enhancements.
• Tackling the data challenge. A central data lake was established between SAP and o9 to enable data consolidation, enrichment, and validation. Automated checks and dashboards proactively flag data quality issues, supported by dedicated business and IT teams focused on continuous data cleansing and governance.

Closing remarks

The closing message was the most strategic. Supply chain capability—accurate forecasting, intelligent inventory positioning, reliable order promising, and the ability to absorb disruption without failing customers—has become a product-like differentiator. It's something customers actively choose suppliers like RHI Magnesita for and a topic that now commands boardroom attention.

But that kind of capability cannot be bought off the shelf. It has to be designed, built, and continuously improved.

That is precisely what makes the choice of partners so consequential. At this scale of transformation, the distinction between a vendor and a strategic partner is not semantic. o9 is not simply a technology provider, and EFESO is not merely a systems integrator. Together with RHI Magnesita, they are co-owners of the outcome, working together to resolve the inevitable challenges that arise on the journey.

It's that one-team mindset—when you can “no longer tell who works for whom”—that makes transformations of this scale possible.