Quad Infotech has begun implementation activities 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 will play an essential role in addressing the challenges of scheduling, billet inspection, failure analysis, corrective action placement and reporting key performance indicators in all areas of operation. QMOS will also allow 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 include:
- Multi caster and multi EAF schedule and operation visibility by station
- 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
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.
Gerdau is a leading producer of long steel in the Americas and one of the largest suppliers of special steel in the world. With over 45,000 employees, it has industrial operations in 14 countries – in the Americas, Europe and Asia – which together represent an installed capacity of over 25 million metric tons of steel per year. It is the largest recycler in Latin America and around the world it transforms, each year, millions of metric tons of scrap into steel, reinforcing its commitment to sustainable development in the regions where it operates. With more than 140,000 shareholders, the Company is listed on the stock exchanges of Sao Paulo, New York and Madrid.
Quad Infotech is a software engineering and design company that specializes in the development of industrial computer software for the steel industry. Quad’s unique combination of steelmaking and rolling process knowledge, combined with computer software design expertise, renders Quad’s Level-2 and Level-3 software products unique in the global steel minimill market. [QMOS] has been operating in numerous steel plants throughout North America and Europe since 1994.