Baosteel Ltd.’s No. 4 Non-Oriented Silicon Steel Line has produced a cumulative 210,000 tonnes of product, fulfilling its annual production target nearly two months ahead of schedule. The line has also satisfied a number of the company’s other targets, such as cost, quality, and range of products, helping to lay the foundation for fulfilling customer needs and achieving economic production.
The No. 4 Non-Oriented Silicon Steel Line had faced a number of difficulties, including equipment failures. Baosteel’s Silicon Department explored the production organization with the involvement of all staff, seeking to identify potential economic benefits from production, cost and range of product.
The all-staff team laid the foundation for fast and smooth operation of No. 4 Non-Oriented Silicon Steel Line. The company’s Silicon Steel Plant Division 2 actively benchmarked with similar lines, ultimately establishing the "Short, flat and quick" working mechanism with the equipment sector. Through flow simplification, transfer, demand feedback and so on, they combed through the process level by level to identify major failures, which would be the focus of the solutions. The team also worked in close cooperation with the maintenance sector to optimize the maintenance mode, so the major periodical maintenance stops were all finished smoothly as scheduled.
As a result of the team’s efforts, the No. 4 Non-Oriented Silicon Steel Line has reduced the time and lasting duration of line failures by 70% and 86%, respectively, compared with last August.
Building from the core principle of economic production, Baosteel’s Silicon Department also involved all staff in efforts to improve quality and costs. Regarding quality, Plant Division 2 has carried out the quality improvement activity, with "zero undetected defect in incoming materials" as their target. As a result of these efforts, the line’s primary yield has improved to 99.48% from a primary yield of 97.73% last August, and the defect re-judging rate has dropped from 3.345% to 0.842%.
As a result of the efforts of all staff, Baosteel’s Non-Oriented Silicon Steel Line has expanded the number of product varieties to 40, 30 more than last August. For all 40 varieties, the line is capable of stable production.
Extremely light gauge products are among the new varieties the line is capable of producing, which will help to fill an existing gap in domestic manufacture. The company noted that all performances of the extremely light gauge products have reached the world level. In addition, the line has also achieved stable production of top-grade environment-friendly coated products, which are exported to overseas market.