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AIS System Provides Material Tracking, Flow Control for Swiss Steel Wire Rod and Bar Mill
Oct. 16, 2008 AIS recently completed its implementation of a Material Tracking System (MTS) for Swiss Steel (formerly von Moos Stahl) in Switzerland. The AIS solution provides Swiss Steel’s high performance wire rod and bar mill with a plant-wide Material and Production Order Tracking System, including Production Order Tracking.
Swiss Steel was targeting installation of a solution that would cover the whole production process, including all material and production order routes for the entire rolling mill plant. The company also intended for the system to integrate several stand-alone systems that would provide relevant quality information and manual inputs.
With the new solution, Swiss Steel intended to increase productivity by reducing position gaps between production orders and by preventing material mix-ups throughout the process. An additional objective was the collection of high-quality process data over a long period that could be used to prove and increase product quality using process data analysis.
The new system will manage detailed information about each production order and piece of material. For each material leaving a production area, relevant quality parameters are validated against technological, production order, and customer constraints. Violations are logged and the operator is notified immediately.
Most of the process and data are recorded with a frequency of one second. All gathered production orders and process-related data are stored over a period of 15 years in a dedicated Archiving and Reporting Database. The user-friendly application provides maximum information about the product’s actual manufacture. Swiss Steel wants to strengthen its cooperation with AIS in Level 2 process engineering and for further extensions of the system.
"With this system we have the best overview and control of what actually happens in production,” said Benno Brun, Project Manager and System Engineer, and Georg Nussbaum, Production Manager. “We can intervene in time when scheduling or charging problems occur. With the big amount of collected data and analysis tools, we have means to identify weak points in our production processes.” They added that productivity was significantly increased with the introduction of the new system.
The project was finished in summer 2008.