Swiss Steel’s Emmenbrücke plant has awarded MET/Con an order to supply a PQA (Product Quality Analyzer) for quality management along its complete production chain. The new PQA from MET/Con will be implemented as a pilot for a group-wide Industry 4.0 initiative. With this quality management system, Swiss Steel aims to enhance quality levels along its production chain, achieve more stability in the production process, further improve on-time delivery performance and optimise company competitiveness.

MET/Con, a company of SMS Group, was commissioned to supply an integrated IT solution operating on knowledge-based expert rules. Use will be made of a software and database solution from Aachen-based QuinLogic, an SMS Group company. Solutions based on this approach have been successfully implemented at selected flat steel producers running a variety of downstream processes.
The PQA system carries out online analyses of process, production and quality data from steelmaking, casting and rolling, right down to the drawing processes. PQA quality rules, which can be freely configured and fed with specific know-how, take into account customer- and order-specific information in the quality assessment process and for the block-or-release decisions for the next downstream processing step.
With this project, Swiss Steel, Steeltec and MET/Con want to set a milestone showing how the performance, efficiency and quality level of the mill can be further improved by gaining total process and production transparency.
For further information www.sms-group.com