General problems of all of the areas
General problems
Most of the plannings and programmings were done manually. The whole knowledge of the process resided only with the responsible professional for the elaboration of the planning. This made the company dependent of the professional. Not always the professional had enough broad vision to supply the plant floor operation with best possible solution.
Proble that I had direct action
Scheduling of Cold Rolling Steel Mill
The Scheduling of Cold Rolling Steel Mill was made manually. The modification of equipments configurations is very expensive because it involves the change of acid baths. Moreover, The equipments need to be stopped for periods of approximately 8 hours. Besides that, the coils are welded one with the other. So, it is necessary to sequence the coils taking the width and thickness into consideration. This makes scheduling a very complex task.
Material reallocation on cold rolling plant
The defects information was written in a paper record. The maps evaluation required a specific knowledge of the destiny that each customer will do of their coils. Depending on the use, certain defects are tolerated and other not. The diversity of combinations of defects in the coils together with each customer's defect tolerance, does the allocation in this area a great problem to the company.
Programming of cuts lines
The programming was made manually. Each time that a cut is done, some lost an material happened in the borders. The decision of rewind a coil or to invert it's faces should be made with certain criteria, because superficial defects can be inserted. The programming of this line is extremely dependent of the allocations decisions made in cold rolling line.
Shipment scheduling
The Shipment Scheduling was manual and difficult due to need of to group the materials for certain close destinations and to comply withe restrictions of capacity of each available truck.
Materials allocation
The Materials Allocation was made manually and it was very difficult due to the amount of available materials in the several stages of the process. It was necessary to analyze the sequence of production of the orders and for each production stage verify if there are available materials with the specific characteristics for that specific stage.
Problems that I didn't have any action
Annual planning
The annual planning was generated using a forecast of sales of each type of steel for each month of the the year. This forecast was inserted in a system based on lineal programming which was prepared with the restrictions of production capacity of each production line. The output of the system was a composition of possible types that could be produced in every month maximizing the profitability. It was difficulty to enter the data and it was executed only once a year. The plan was not updated during the year with the information of current production and the sales planning. The use of the information of the annual planning it was totally manual.
Campaigns planning
The Campaigns planning was made manually. The difficulty in combining the current orders and production planning added ti the difficulty in minimizing the amount of set-ups of equipments configurations makes the the creation of campaigns plan a very difficult task.
Production steps generation
The process of identification of the sequence of production steps for each order was based on previous order records. Moreover there was not an automatic consult to the materials available in stock in each of the several production stages. The information of the production process were used in a manual way.
Melt shop programming
The scheduling of Melt Shop was made manually. To accomplish the programming it is necessary to take in consideration the orders already in place, the production steps, the readiness and historical use of the pots and the need to use the equipments to a maximum . For this, the Melt Shop Scheduling is extremely complex and demand a high skilled personnel.
Scheduling of Hot Rolling Steel Mill
The Scheduling of Hot Rolling Steel Mill was made manually. The oven holds seven plates at the same time. Each type of steel has to stay different times inside of the oven. The transitions among steels are made with the placement of carbon plates. This turns the scheduling an extremely difficult problem due to the need to visualize the arrival of materials with great antecedence.
