STEELMAN: Production Management

The main function of this module is the consolidation of part of Sales Order Plan (SOP) into the Production Order Plan (POP) as follows:

• the seven (7) day sliding window for slab demand to the Hot Rolling Mill from the Steel Plant Continuous Casters, and
• the one (1) day window for all other Processing Units.

The width of the POP stated above is flexible and can be changed by authorized company personnel via the parameters in a data base. The POP is created for each Processing Unit in the major processing areas, i.e. Hot Rolled, Cold Rolled and Finished Product, and downloaded to the Plant Level Production Schedulers for localized optimization of the Processing Units. Timing of the POP creation is scheduled by the company.

STEELMAN as currently implemented stops at the issuing of the Production Order Plan for manipulation into the Accepted Production Order Plan by the Plant Level Production Schedulers. However, optimization modules for the plant level scheduling function can be readily integrated into the STEELMAN environment at a later date.

The Production Schedulers operator interface for the creation of the Accepted Production Order Plan (APOP), from the Production Order Plan (POP), and the interface for the transfer of the APOP to the individual Plant Level Scheduling systems both via the Production Management Module can be customized to suit the operators and would be re-defined during the system implementation stage.

Requirements for production of Hot Band via the Hot Rolling Mill is given as number of pieces and tons/tones of coiled steel to be produced and as the number of pieces and tons/tones of slabs to be consumed. Currently, the number of slabs to be utilized by the Production Schedulers is external to STEELMAN in determining the number of heats of steel to be produced in the Steel Plants and the order or sequence to cast the heats through the Continuous Casters.