Technology & Steel Application - News

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