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by Lauren Gibbons Paul, Contributing Editor Posted on Wednesday, February 28, 2007 2:04:20 PM   | Abstract: | Australian-based Smorgon Steel discards pen and paper in favor of software that automates the monitoring of plant downtime. |
Like any makers of commodity products, steel producers are behind the eight ball, profit-wise. Because they sit at the beginning of the supply chain, providing raw steel for others to turn into finished goods, opportunities for revenue enhancement are few, and margins are tight. Therefore, steel manufacturers must do whatever they can to maximize the performance of their costly plant equipment. With an overall corporate directive to become the lowest-cost steel producer in Australia, $2.4 billion Smorgon Steel Group Ltd. knew it would need to minimize production downtime if it were to meet that goal. In 2002, the company decided to automate the tracking of downtime at its Laverton mill, which contains a rod and bar mill and a meltshop. Plant operators had always recorded the start and finish times of such events on paper, then entered that data into disparate systems. Those records were notoriously inaccurate and did not give management timely insight into the causes or possible prevention of the downtime. Smorgon replaced its manual reporting system with FactoryTalk performance improvement software (formerly RSBizware) from Rockwell Automation Inc. in 2002. The FactoryTalk software falls under the category of enterprise manufacturing intelligence (EMI), according to Alison Smith, senior research analyst for manufacturing operations at AMR Research. EMI is critically important in "asset-heavy" industries like mining, power generation, and steel and oil production, where raw material is run through a lengthy process and then sold to other manufacturers. Since companies like Smorgon are at the beginning of the supply chain, Smith says, there is little in the way of product mix, so production changeover is rarely the culprit in downtime. So, rather than relying on a manufacturing execution system (MES) to refine the production processes, as discrete manufacturers do, such companies focus on asset utilization and optimization. "Monitoring is huge. It's all about trying to squeeze a little more margin out of the commodity products by getting more out of the equipment," Smith explains. Performance Analysis Downtime is costly to every manufacturing operation, but even more so to a steel company. "This is a rolling mill," explains Wayne Pearse, project electrical superintendent at Smorgon's Laverton mill, "so pieces of scrap are delivered to the site and we have furnaces that melt the scrap to make a piece of steel 6 inches by 6 inches by 7 meters long. This is a single-line plant. So when we stop one part, the whole process stops. Monitoring the downtime is critical," Pearse says. Though he declined to specify exactly how much every minute of downtime costs the Laverton site, Pearse summed it up in one word: "Expensive." "To maximize the performance of the mill, we wanted to analyze downtime data," he says. "Every time we have a production change or breakdown, we wanted to analyze and understand why we're stopping and how we can get back up and running again as quickly as possible." This is a challenge, since the majority of the time engineering staff are not at the Laverton site, Pearse explains. Echoes Smith, "When an asset goes down in an industry like that, you're not down for hours until a guy with a screwdriver comes out to fix it. You're down for days and it costs millions." Smorgon realized that automating downtime reporting would free operators from the bondage of noting such events on paper and manually entering the information into various systems. And it would arm management with the data needed to make better decisions, ultimately reducing downtime. Since Smorgon's Oracle JD Edwards ERP system did not then offer monitoring capabilities, 23-year company veteran Pearse and his team turned to the software division of Rockwell, Smorgon's primary controls vendor, to see if it had an application that could capture downtime electronically. Page : 1 2 3 ... NEXT |