Swiss Steel, a member of the Schmolz + Bickenbach Group, produces around 600,000 tons of engineering steel a year at its Emmenbrücke site, some of which is further processed within the Schmolz + Bickenbach Group by Steeltec as a bright steel plant. These special steels are used in the automotive and mechanical engineering industries, among others.

As part of a company-wide Industry 4.0 initiative, MET/Con's new PQA quality management system is to be piloted at the Emmenbrücke site to further improve quality levels across all processes, further stabilize the production process, increase delivery reliability and thus optimize competitiveness in the long term.

To this end, MET/Con, an SMS Group company, was commissioned to deliver an IT system solution with a holistic approach incorporating a know-how-based set of expert rules. The modern software and database solution from QuinLogic in Aachen, also an SMS Group company, was used. Such an approach has been successfully implemented in the past at selected flat steel manufacturers with a high processing depth.

The PQA system analyzes online process, production and quality data from steel production to the casting, rolling and drawing process. The PQA expert rules, which are freely configurable and include specific know-how, take customer and order-specific information into account in the quality assessment and release for further processing.

Modular software structure

The modular software structure includes a LogicDesigner for flexible rule customization, a quality assessment module and a web-based reporting system. At the heart of the quality management system is the DataCorrelator software module, which covers current topics such as big data analysis and artificial intelligence (AI). Various intelligent, mathematical evaluation methods, including pattern recognition options, are used to identify correlations that can be used directly for process optimization.

With this project, Swiss Steel, Steeltec and MET/Con want to jointly set a milestone in how the site's performance and quality level can be improved in the future through complete process and production transparency.

The SMS Group is a group of internationally active plant and mechanical engineering companies for the steel and non-ferrous metals industry. Around 13,500 employees worldwide generate a turnover of over EUR 3 billion. The sole owner of the holding company SMS Group GmbH is the Weiss Family Foundation. am