Arvedi AST choses Fives to take a digital step forward in production management

In the fast-paced steel production world, staying competitive is an ongoing challenge. Arvedi AST (Acciai Speciali Terni), a leading European stainless steelmaker, has chosen Fives to take a digital step forward to transform their production management.

Eyeron®, an intelligent quality management system developed by Fives, was installed across the entire integrated plant of Arvedi AST with the aim of streamlining the production process and taking quality management to a higher level.

“We had, on one hand, a huge amount of process data handled by different systems across several steel manufacturing workshops, and, on the other hand, demanding requirements regarding coil quality from individual customers. Therefore, our primary goal was to find a digital solution that would allow us to consolidate process and quality-related information on a single device, increasing efficiency and significantly improving quality control,” says Gian Piero Ruello, Coil Intelligent Processing Project Manager at Arvedi AST.

As the project developed, the initial focus shifted towards real time coil production control. Eyeron® was installed at all steel manufacturing workshops offering monitoring and intelligent process control for:

• Steelmaking
• Continuous casting
• Hot rolling mill
• Hot annealing & pickling lines
• Cold rolling mills
• Cold annealing and picking lines

“Eyeron® fundamentally transformed our company's work philosophy, enabling proactive quality control and production issue prevention. Fives played a key role in this process, demonstrating a high level of professionalism and expertise throughout the entire journey, offering customized solutions and constant assistance and guidance,” adds Gian Piero Ruello.

The project consisted of several key stages, including data collection, rule enforcement, and dashboard customization. Each stage had its challenges that pushed the joint project team to find appropriate solutions. The first milestone - data collection - was the most crucial as it required an upgrade of the internal system and infrastructure to handle the massive data that Eyeron® required.

The second phase concerned the management of quality rules to effectively manage the collected data: the quality rules applied by the quality managers were first rationalized before being implemented in Eyeron® thanks to its user-friendly rule editor.

The final stage encompassed dynamic scheduling with product reallocation module and Machine Learning Algorithms application for process control improvement. This last phase also provided an opportunity to adapt dashboards and reports to the needs of each user.

Today, Eyeron® usage across the plant represents a success in enhancing customer support and streamlining claim processing. It allows the following advantages:

• Make timely decisions on coil quality and destination
• Simplify complex decision-making processes by providing an automatic coil grading in real time after each process steps
• Automatically reassign coils according to the final customer's quality requirements
• Reduce the amount of downgraded and scrapped products

The project resulted in a substantial improvement in productivity, quality, and defect detection. This intelligent system helps avoid customer dissatisfaction and the potential damage caused by issues in earlier production stages.

Source and Photo: Fives