EUROPEAN STEEL TECHNOLOGY AND APPLICATION DAYS 2017 - ESTAD 2017

The challenging and competitive market situation caused by worldwide excess capacity forces more and more steel producers into the market of high-quality, high-price products in order to increase their profits. Compared to commodity grades high-quality products pose substantial demands on the quality management, which has to address extremely tight production tolerances across the entire production chain and additional documentation activities in order to fulfill product and customer related quality standards. All these activities take advantage from adequate IT-system support and appropriately trained employees in order to operate and manage the plant within tight tolerances across the entire production route. In order to support steel producers who want to improve product quality and production efficiency, Primetals has developed its TPQC (Through-Process Quality Control) system. TPQC is a know-how based through-process quality management and control system, which performs automated rule-based quality checks for the entire production route driven by Primetals’ unique know-how based root-cause analysis features. The system provides product specific assistance for quality engineers and operators to help them identifying the causes of detected quality deviations. Due to the root-cause analysis quality engineers and operators are receiving detailed instructions regarding so called corrective actions, which are meant to eliminate the causes of non-conformities. Thus, TPQC actually is both, a quality system and a learning tool, aiming at quality and process sustainability, by application of supplemental technological know-how. The specific root-cause analysis feature is the result of a team work between Primetals IT and automation experts and Primetals’ metallurgical technologists, contributing the required product and grade specific know-how.