#01 Production & Logistics
Thanks to our extended Manufacturing Execution System (MES) solution, our customers can manage the complete order lifecycle within their plants, from acquisition, right up to material dispatch, with planning, scheduling and execution steps along the way. We also design and implement automated logistics solutions, ranging from automatic yards with relevant warehouse management systems – significantly boosting overall plant efficiency and improving worker health and safety – to AI-based scrap and raw material classification systems, thus reducing the human factor.
A MES and a WMS will boost your plant efficiency.
Bar Counting System
Case
History
#01
Who
One of the world’s leading vertically-integrated steel and steel-related mining companies, producing a wide range of flat and long products for various applications.
Why
The objective of the customer was to centralise coordination and optimise the performance of all its plants, consisting of 17 shops with a total production of 11.1 million tons per year.
The company’s priorities included:
- tracking and monitoring of production orders in an integrated manner between plants;
- operational efficiency and overall improvement of delivery performance;
- centralised master data management.
- shop-floor integration and complete production supervision;
availability of reporting with on-line production and shipment dashboard and KPIs from everywhere.
How
Implementation of the Q3-MET suite, an extended MES solution providing modern and efficient tools for managing the entire customer order lifecycle, from its acceptance to the shipment of products, with planning, scheduling, execution and material certification steps in between.
The modularity of the solution allows the customer to:
- collect and complete, with technical and technological information, customer orders, making them available for the subsequent process steps;
- centralise all the configurations needed for the process chain execution;
- organise the activities for the Process Control Systems and receive the production data in automatic mode. This allows the operator to track and trace product quality and automatically verify compliance of the produced material against the order requirements;
- view the material inventory in real time and trace the material movements within the yards;
- follow the certification process of the produced material, creating the sampling plan and tracking the sample lifecycle. Automatic material certification, with dedicated certificate, is an integrated part of the solution, allowing shipment of the material to the final customer.
- track the vehicles in the plant, creating and assigning the load requests, recording the loaded material and generating the shipping documents.
The system guides the users, enabling them to trace activities throughout the entire production process, ensuring a timely reaction in the event of any potential issues inside the plant. Last but not least, the Q3-MET suite allows easy access to the on-line reports and KPIs, to provide company management with an overview of the real-time situation.
What
The benefits obtained by the customer can be summarised as follows:
- Quantitative benefits:
-
- Increased inventory turnover (15% reduced inventories)
- Increased overall equipment effectiveness (+10%)
- Improved adherence to plans and schedules
- Reduced surplus and not-prime production (-10% not prime production)
- Qualitative benefits:
-
- Increased availability of the operations team, allowing them to focus on added-value activities
- Improved efficiency of personnel
- Increased quality control accuracy (-30% piece ri-certification)
Media
Bar Counting System
Who
One of the world’s leading vertically-integrated steel and steel-related mining companies, producing a wide range of flat and long products for various applications.
Why
The objective of the customer was to centralise coordination and optimise the performance of all its plants, consisting of 17 shops with a total production of 11.1 million tons per year.
The company’s priorities included:
- tracking and monitoring of production orders in an integrated manner between plants;
- operational efficiency and overall improvement of delivery performance;
- centralised master data management.
- shop-floor integration and complete production supervision;
availability of reporting with on-line production and shipment dashboard and KPIs from everywhere.
How
Implementation of the Q3-MET suite, an extended MES solution providing modern and efficient tools for managing the entire customer order lifecycle, from its acceptance to the shipment of products, with planning, scheduling, execution and material certification steps in between.
The modularity of the solution allows the customer to:
- collect and complete, with technical and technological information, customer orders, making them available for the subsequent process steps;
- centralise all the configurations needed for the process chain execution;
- organise the activities for the Process Control Systems and receive the production data in automatic mode. This allows the operator to track and trace product quality and automatically verify compliance of the produced material against the order requirements;
- view the material inventory in real time and trace the material movements within the yards;
- follow the certification process of the produced material, creating the sampling plan and tracking the sample lifecycle. Automatic material certification, with dedicated certificate, is an integrated part of the solution, allowing shipment of the material to the final customer.
- track the vehicles in the plant, creating and assigning the load requests, recording the loaded material and generating the shipping documents.
The system guides the users, enabling them to trace activities throughout the entire production process, ensuring a timely reaction in the event of any potential issues inside the plant. Last but not least, the Q3-MET suite allows easy access to the on-line reports and KPIs, to provide company management with an overview of the real-time situation.
What
The benefits obtained by the customer can be summarised as follows:
- Quantitative benefits:
-
- Increased inventory turnover (15% reduced inventories)
- Increased overall equipment effectiveness (+10%)
- Improved adherence to plans and schedules
- Reduced surplus and not-prime production (-10% not prime production)
- Qualitative benefits:
-
- Increased availability of the operations team, allowing them to focus on added-value activities
- Improved efficiency of personnel
- Increased quality control accuracy (-30% piece ri-certification)
Media
Bar Counting System
Case
History
#02
Who
European leader in high-quality steel, producing 1,100,000 tons of cast ingots, cast blooms, round and forged bars each year for various industries, such as automotive, trucks, earth-moving equipment, bearings, wind, rail, military, oil & gas, nuclear, agricultural and industrial vehicles.
Why
Pursuing its continuous improvement programme, the customer aimed to improve overall plant efficiency, focusing in particular on reducing operating costs and lead times.
This project was specifically catered to meeting the following needs related to the meltshop area:
- minimisation of equipment setup time, especially in the casting machines;
- know-how formalisation, especially as regards the scheduling of hard and soft constraints, to guarantee the capability of producing high-quality steel under all conditions.
How
Implementation of the Q3-MET Advanced Scheduling solution, providing optimised work order sequences by applying “local search” algorithms in order to minimise a defined multi-objective cost function.
The first activity involved collecting and configuring the required basic information in the master data module, such as the plant equipment, possible routings, transportation times, the process time for each equipment and product and the expected energy per ton for each steel grade. Moreover, the operational and technological soft and hard constraints were jointly defined during this phase of the project.
Definition of the objective functions and of the KPIs to be optimised was then of fundamental importance. Objective functions can be combined and tuned through a set of adjustable parameters to calculate the overall costs of the solution. The solution provides the possibility of storing different configurations to support several plant working conditions. Primary information, such as appointments, products, steel grades and quantities, hot-charge appointments, order priorities and quality aspects are examples of factors that can affect the schedule. After collecting the order portfolio and selecting the objective function to apply, the user starts to show the evolution of the schedule in real-time, giving the scheduler an easy-to-understand, clear picture of the plant schedule and the actual cost of the solution. When the total cost of the objective functions cannot be improved any further, the optimisation process is complete.
What
The benefits obtained by the customer can be summarised as follows:
- optimized meltshop efficiency;
- minimised quality critical paths.
The customer is currently evaluating the possibility of extending this approach to other plant areas.
Who
European leader in high-quality steel, producing 1,100,000 tons of cast ingots, cast blooms, round and forged bars each year for various industries, such as automotive, trucks, earth-moving equipment, bearings, wind, rail, military, oil & gas, nuclear, agricultural and industrial vehicles.
Why
Pursuing its continuous improvement programme, the customer aimed to improve overall plant efficiency, focusing in particular on reducing operating costs and lead times.
This project was specifically catered to meeting the following needs related to the meltshop area:
- minimisation of equipment setup time, especially in the casting machines;
- know-how formalisation, especially as regards the scheduling of hard and soft constraints, to guarantee the capability of producing high-quality steel under all conditions.
How
Implementation of the Q3-MET Advanced Scheduling solution, providing optimised work order sequences by applying “local search” algorithms in order to minimise a defined multi-objective cost function.
The first activity involved collecting and configuring the required basic information in the master data module, such as the plant equipment, possible routings, transportation times, the process time for each equipment and product and the expected energy per ton for each steel grade. Moreover, the operational and technological soft and hard constraints were jointly defined during this phase of the project.
Definition of the objective functions and of the KPIs to be optimised was then of fundamental importance. Objective functions can be combined and tuned through a set of adjustable parameters to calculate the overall costs of the solution. The solution provides the possibility of storing different configurations to support several plant working conditions. Primary information, such as appointments, products, steel grades and quantities, hot-charge appointments, order priorities and quality aspects are examples of factors that can affect the schedule. After collecting the order portfolio and selecting the objective function to apply, the user starts to show the evolution of the schedule in real-time, giving the scheduler an easy-to-understand, clear picture of the plant schedule and the actual cost of the solution. When the total cost of the objective functions cannot be improved any further, the optimisation process is complete.
What
The benefits obtained by the customer can be summarised as follows:
- optimized meltshop efficiency;
- minimised quality critical paths.
The customer is currently evaluating the possibility of extending this approach to other plant areas.
