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Author's profile photo Stefan Weisenberger

Manufacturing, Operations, and Supply Chain Management in Mill Products & Mining

  

Mill Products industries, like metals, paper, plactics, textiles, are neither pure process, nor pure discrete manufacturing. For example in steel, the first process steps of an integrated steel mill are closer to process manufacturing. After the caster, we deal with discrete items moving through the next process steps.

In many cases, the bill of materials is rather simple – as we do not have an assembly process. A very typical scenario, like cutting, slitting, or sheeting, creates a large number of „output“ items, from one input material, like a slab or a jumbo roll.

This „inverse“ BOM requires specific manufacturing and planning processes in mill products – including order combination, and trimming.

In addition, we see a mix of make-to-stock, make-to-order, and finish-to-order strategies.

On the other hand, like in any other asset-intensive manufacturing industries, operational efficiency, safety, and quality are essential. Advances from Industrial IOT / Industrie 4.0, and predictive big data analytics, enable many mills and mines already today to acchieve significant improvements. like in the examples below:

The archive of past discussions also contains a wealth of information, mainly more detailed questions & answers – for example this one about steel specific supply chain planning and order promising – including global ATP, capable-to-promise.

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