Posted on 18 Jan 2013
Essar Steel adopts high end Mill Distribution System
With increasing and varied capabilities and capacities, Essar Steel
required to know and decide the best quality and most cost effective
route for production well before it started to manufacture a product for
any customer.
A unique and innovative solution called ‘Mill Distribution System’ was
designed and developed using SAP Netweaver as front end technology and
SAP, i2 Factory Planner as the back end system. This in turn was tightly
integrated with online real time data flow to support business
operations. This helped in getting the best output from the plant while
details of the parameters remained transparent to the sales executive.
As each product had multiple routes for production, it was essential to
fix one route in the system while ordering for a material. Using system
intelligence, the system today provides the planner a facility to
identify optimum process path for a particular order based on
capability, quality, capacity and cost. These parameters became the
mandate to operate when multiple technologies are deployed to produce
similar material. The solution translates the requirement of customers
into plans/schedules and production instructions, which need no human
intervention.
Using quotation data, system identifies the least cost and the best
quality production route using multiple routes. The solution also
provides the flexibility to change the mill due to dynamic plant
conditions. Before the MDS system was implemented, the SCM team was
keeping a track of each and every sales order that was entered by the
marketing team. While tracking, the main task was to analyze the
capability of both production routes, compare cost figures and then
manually divert the sales order to the production route that was derived
by manual calculations.
Currently, the ability to fulfill an order has improved significantly.
Manual errors have reduced and the effort to track sales orders and
divert as required using Excel-based calculators are eliminated. The
system automatically determines the least cost route considering
capability, capacity, quality and cost of the multiple routes selected
for the product required by a sales order.
Source - Essar Steel
