Quad Infotech has completed the commissioning of the QMOS MES, APEX Reporting application, Manufacturing Intelligence tool (MI), and QMOS iOS App at Gerdau’s Midlothian, Texas facility. The Midlothian plant is a large facility, equipped with two Electric Arc Furnaces (EAF), ladle refining stations, and three casters feeding three rolling mills. The rolling mills produce long large section, medium section structural and long bar products. QMOS receives all orders from SAP for various work centers and is responsible for scheduling, production tracking and monitoring of the entire production line from scrap charging, melting and casting all the way to rolling, bundling and downstream operations. QMOS also covers all the setup and maintenance operations such as ladle and tundish management, roll shop, guide shop, stand building, saw and shear management and more. QMOS fully covers the operations of the billet yard as well as all quality labs for the melt shop and the rolling mill.
QMOS, APEX , MI, and iOS app help address many of the operational challenges such as failure analysis, corrective action placement and reporting key performance indicators in all areas of operation. QMOS also allows Midlothian facility to perform post processing functions, designed with full quality checks in place and seamlessly integrated with their SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool.
Some of the highlights of this implementation included the following tools:
- Multi caster and multi EAF schedule and operation visibility by station
- Advanced Alloy calculator to minimize alloy cost at LRS
- Advanced Equipment Management System (EMS) tracking all equipment related parameters including ladle residency time at the preheater or repair bays
- Large section mill scheduling tool, embedded with billet optimization logic to satisfy multiple orders and minimize metallic loss in the rolling mill
- Hot and cold billet inspection recording and analysis tools
- Management and tracking of planned scheduled billet moves within the billet yard
- ASTM mandated management of merged billet batches
- Roll inspection and analysis screens
- End to end billet tracking, identifying each bar on the cooling bed by heat, strand and cut
- Corrective action identification and execution tool for finished and semi-finished goods
- iOS mobile app for Roll Management
- iOS mobile app for bundle inspections in the yard
- Mobile production alarms, notifications and reports
The advanced data analysis tools in QMOS, MI and APEX as well as its standard and custom production and KPI reports provide the Gerdau plant with great opportunities for targeted process analysis and performance evaluation.