Finding a needle in a haystack in seconds:

Coil monitoring with ibaDatawyzer-ICC

With a production of over 600,000 tons per year, the BILSTEIN Group is one of the world's leading manufacturers of cold-rolled steel strip. Despite the enormous quantity of coils produced, no two metal strips are the same. "We are not a classic mass manufacturer, but rather we explicitly respond to customer requirements. It is therefore essential to have flexible production and to coordinate and monitor it," says Ufuk Karvan, who is responsible for process and system technology at the cold-rolled strip manufacturer. BILSTEIN products are used in tool production and in the construction and automotive industries. BILSTEIN's production area covers around 700,000 square meters. This makes it all the more important to be able to identify and determine the coils throughout the entire production chain. "Our process routes are quite complex and, in addition, every human intervention is a small potential source of error. That's why we want and need to detect material mix-ups at an early stage," says Karvan. To ensure this, the BILSTEIN Group relies on ibaDatawyzer-ICC, the coil identification software from iba AG. "With ibaDatawyzer-ICC, a patented fingerprint process comes into play: each coil develops a characteristic thickness profile over the length of the strip during rolling. Using this specific curve, which is recorded online with thickness measurement systems and is unique for each coil like a human fingerprint, we can reliably identify coils and rule out mix-ups," says Karvan. To do this, ibaDatawyzer-ICC uses the process data recorded with ibaPDA to generate unique features for each coil, which are then stored in a database for long-term availability.

Processing of a mix-up: high risk of damage

At the BILSTEIN plant in Hagen, hot-rolled coils are first cut to size and then further processed using heat treatment, rolling and cutting processes. "We receive a hot strip that we cut into different strips. These all have the same width, quality and hot-rolled strip properties, so they are basically identical. That's why a mix-up could easily happen here," reports Karvan. It becomes particularly critical if the metal strips are assigned to the wrong order and are not processed correctly: "If a coil is mixed up, then in the worst case we could no longer supply a customer and would have to wait for a suitable hot-rolled strip to arrive. On top of that, around 25 tons of material would be scrap. At a value of around €2,000 per tonne, you can quickly calculate the damage that would be caused," says Karvan. BILSTEIN eliminates this risk with the use of ibaDatawyzer-ICC: "With the system, we not only see immediately if something doesn't fit somewhere, but are also shown the correct coil directly," says Karvan, who is completely satisfied with the iba solution. BILSTEIN's internal database now contains over 180,000 entries, each of which contains the specific characteristics of the respective coil. Nevertheless, "the needle in the haystack can be found in a matter of seconds," says Karvan.

Long-term analyses bring "huge added value"

BILSTEIN also relies on the iba system to monitor the various plants, with almost 60 ibaPDA (Process Data Acquisition) systems in use for data acquisition. Together with iba, BILSTEIN has developed a very special application for the web-based dashboard tool ibaDaVIS: By consistently linking ibaDatawyzer-ICC, which monitors the coils during the individual production steps in the background, with ibaDaVIS, long-term observations can be made and thus trends and further optimization potential can be identified. In this way, for example, the error-free functioning of the measurement technology used can be permanently verified or comprehensive reports can be created for individual coils. "The fact that we can carry out long-term analyses with ibaDaVIS and ibaDatawyzer-ICC has huge added value for us. A number of ideas have already emerged from the insights we have already gained there. So far, we are the first and only ones to do this," reports Karvan.