Aso Siderurgica

ASO SIDERURGICA is a world leader in the production of raw ingots, with round, square and polygonal cross sections, bottom poured and stress-relieved. The plant covers a surface area of around 100,000 m2. The steel mill comprises a scrap yard, an electric furnace, two ladle furnaces and two vacuum-degassing systems that can process up to 53 tonnes of molten steel a day. Multiple casting pits house the various types of ingot moulds, and the casting and service cars guarantee full control and recording of casting parameters.

Before adopting STAIN’s MILL+ solution, ASO SIDERURGICA calculated the costs and requirements for each heat, based on standard consumption and costs, rather than actual field data, which were often available with a considerable delay or were not sufficiently reliable. The various company departments used a mass of Excel spreadsheets for local processing, using data from handwritten reports and printouts generated by plant supervisors, with no integration or sharing of information.

As part of its continuous improvement policy, ASO SIDERURGICA identified the strategic target of innovating its technology and organisation and decided to collaborate with STAIN on a project covering direct field acquisition, management and tracking of all production, quality and logistics data in order to relay accurate casting figures to the management system in real time and have a single standardized interface for all company functions – management, production, quality, maintenance and logistics.

To achieve this objective, STAIN, in agreement with the management, developed a project covering the MILL+ MES solution for steel mills that could integrate all field information flows and give information describing each heat the same speed and reliability with which it was produced.

We asked Francesco Uberto, ASO Delegated Director, to describe the results achieved using STAIN’s MILL+ solution:

• “Based on sales orders imported automatically from ERP, the MILL+ handles heat scheduling and electronic despatch to the various workstations of the weekly production schedule for single heats, together with production specifications for ready visibility by the operators having to prepare the furnace charges.

• We achieved complete real-time heat traceability, automated product and process data flow management, and unified and stardardized data previously recorded in hand-written reports or present on plant supervisors in various custom formats.

• The MILL+ computerized the heat register, which records the recipe used, the actual amount of raw material consumed, energy consumption, chemical analyses conducted, and significant process data for the purpose of product and process control, allowing statistical analysis by the various company functions.

• Incoming raw materials (scrap, ferroalloys, powders and refractory  materials) and the grading process for each raw material are tracked electronically. It is also possible to integrate the results of chemical analyses performed on incoming samples in order to generate electronic certifications and statistics on suppliers and  material types.

• The MILL+ controls stocks of scrap and ferroalloys, and preparation and weighing of the buckets of scrap to be loaded in the EAF for each heat. This gave us accurate recording of the consumption of raw materials for each bucket and each addition of ferroalloy in the melting and refining process.

• We computerized the movements of raw materials and finished products by installing on the storemen’s trucks radio frequency terminals able to pilot the deposit and pickup operations.

• We achieved full integration with the ORACLE APPLICATION SYSTEM used to receive sales orders with the production specifications and to automatically transmit the result of each heat, associated with the actual consumption of energy, raw materials, ferroallys and auxiliary materials (e.g. refractory materials and powders).

The technological architecture used is based on a network of fixed PC stations (weighbridge, smelting furnace, refining furnaces, degassing furnace, casting cars, casting pit), wireless terminals for the samplers and preparers of buckets to charge the smelting furnace, and instrumentation for conducting chemical and physical tests on scrap samples and heat specimens at each stage of the process.

The MILL+ suite - continues Francesco Uberto – has enabled us to eliminate lots of paperwork and computerize all the information that was previously written on paper by hand or using specific Excel forms for each department.

From all office computers, we can consult the planning and progress status for each heat, the reference specifications and all the product and process parameters acquired in the field during the various production stages. All the offices use a single reference database supplied in real time with accurate, reliable and univocal data for production or quality analysis statistics and continuous process optimisation.

"Globalisation is rapidly changing the rules on how to tackle the market - concludes Mr Uberto – so it is vital to gain efficiency in all production processes, especially those that impact most on product costs. After seeing for ourselves at a STAIN customer’s what we could achieve technologically and how much we could improve by reorganising our processes with integrated information, we decided to entrust the project to STAIN as we are convinced that, to bring us benefits, such innovations require a reliable and competent TECHNOLOGICAL PARTNER with specific skills in the sector and proven software solutions allowing us to adopt only the technology required to achieve true improvements in company processes, thanks to one-to-one advice, an indispensable initial planning stage and a common path in the resulting business reorganisation.”