Industrial Manufacturing
Leading Steal Manufacturer Picks ADC to Provide Robust, Full-spectrum Applications
The world’s third largest steel wire manufacturer, headquartered in Latin America, planned on increasing production capacity at a major plant in Mexico from 1 to 2 million tons per year. Consequently, they needed an IT consultancy services firm with a strong manufacturing background to build custom applications, including a brand new, tailored ERP, in less than 18 months. Application functionality required included raw materials sourcing, scrap melting and mini-mill processes, chemical and physical quality assurance, inventory management and shipping.
A secondary challenge was to interconnect the new ERP with the PLCs, in order to have real-time information from the plant floor, and be interfaced with 10+ central corporate systems.
Lastly, the company needed to have a robust application capable of working on a 24 hours per day, seven days per week basis—while ensuring that the system could be operated by a wide variety of users.
The steel manufacturer ultimately decided that ADC Austin was the best option to accomplish these goals.
The ADC solution
ADC’S solution was based on the .NET platform, which enabled daily use by more than 250 users—including administrators, managers, supervisors and operators — over 3 daily shifts, all year round. Supported by ADC’s project management office and our methodologies, the solution was created by five teams of analysts, developers, testers and software architects, all working in tandem to ensure the best possible product.
ADC designed the training materials to meet the specific needs of the final user, and, additionally, training groups were organized three times a day to ensure that all three shifts received adequate instruction.
The results
ADC’s solution allowed the physical location of raw material to be displayed in 4 levels of depth, resulting in an optimization of time and motion in the operation of loading raw materials into the furnaces and rolling mills. In addition, ADC’s solution provided the plant autonomy to generate new product introductions, ensuring their compliance with corporate standards, without having to go through the centralized approval process. As a result, the time to enlist a new presentation dramatically decreased from 5 days—to just a few minutes.
What’s more, the company can now track the quality level of piece produced, in each of the 3 lines of lamination and 2 furnaces, and can even analyze multiple defects in a single unit, in order to take preventive actions and make appropriate corrections, all in real time.
Given the demanding timeline and the immense scope of the project, the manufacturer was extremely pleased with ADC’s solution.
