Rizhao Steel Improves Its Production Control

The implementation of the SteelPlanner® MES-System from AIS (Linz, Austria) for the 2150 mm hot strip mill of Rizhao Steel in China has recently been finished by Siemens Ltd., China. AIS is a wholly owned subsidiary of PSI AG (Berlin, Germany).

The AIS SteelPlanner MES solution selected by Rizhao Steel covers the entire business process, starting from order entry to dispatch of finished products. On the planning side, the system covers production and quality planning as well as production scheduling. The acquired actual production data is further used for production, quality control, and planned versus actual comparison.

The combination of the strong local presence of Siemens with the expertise of AIS in MES solutions for the steel industry was a decisive factor in the selection process from Rizhao. Chen Tong, lead engineer of the quality department, says, "With this system's quality planning and comparison mechanism base on configurable rules, we can define flexible rules according to changing market requirements, thus significantly reduce operators? workload, speed up the process and ensure the accuracy against manual operation at the same time."

The MES system provides fast and reliable information of order status, material consumption and output, and accurate information about stocks, to support enterprise information management with existing ERP and Logistics systems. Ji Shengfeng, the manager of IT, says, "The solution merges into our current production information systems smoothly and adapts to our local specific business much faster and better than our expectation."

PSI and AIS form a worldwide market leader in the area of business and manufacturing planning, manufacturing execution, material logistics and energy management for the metals industry. AIS Group is part of PSI headquartered in Berlin. PSI AG develops and integrates complete solutions, on the basis of its own software products, for the management of energy networks (electricity, gas, oil, heat, water), cross-company production management (metals, automotive, mechanical and plant engineering, logistics) and infrastructure management for telecommunications, transport and safety. PSI was founded in 1969 and employs 1,400 people.

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