EUROPEAN STEEL TECHNOLOGY AND APPLICATION DAYS 2017 - ESTAD 2017

Modeling Metals production becomes more challenging due to the constant increase of diversification on one hand and higher quality requirements on the other. At the same time globalization drives the metals industries towards modern ERP “standards” that by default are designed for assembly production. All attempts to model metals production by BoMs are failing as soon as the constantly increasing number of materials let the maintenance effort explode. A costly integration of the well-known Excel sheets or homemade solutions does not seem to be a solution neither. Metals production requires tools that can model production dynamically and respect flow processes. - Rule based calculation instead of “hard coded” BoMs and routings - Dynamic recalculation on demand instead of maintaining hundreds of list - Designed for product engineers not for IT specialist - Full Support of the complex Quality requirements, Testing and Sampling logic instead of inspection plans designed for assembling production - Considering variants and alternatives instead of linear Excel approaches A team of experts in metals production together with mathematicians and IT specialists developed a production modeling tool that allows custom fitted order dressing for metals industries. This approach can be attached to MES and or ERP systems and supports a global and centralized ERP approach but takes the complexity of modeling flow production by using tools designed for assembly production. The order dressing tool has already successfully been introduced at different metals producers with various products (e.g. tubes, heavy plates, aluminum foil) around the world. The full flexibility can be illustrated on the one hand by the fact that the tool can be fed by any type of orders including pre-elaborated Production Orders, customer requirements or ERP Materials and the output would be complete Production Orders ready to be produced, offers including price and costs, usable ERP Materials or Master Data for the ERP system. On the other hand order dressing is capable to handle all kinds of metals specific production processes (ferrous and non-ferrous). The result can be evaluated by planning tools created by teams with the same expertise to run what if scenarios to better estimate the business impact. This paper shows the benefits of the aforementioned approach from a theoretical point of view as well as selected case studies.