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Stalkanat-Silur production association is one of the largest manufacturers of steel ropes and PC strands in Eastern Europe. Leading the market in Ukraine, it produces more than 60,000 tons of products per year.

The company supplies products for the mining, oil & gas and metallurgy industries in more than 30 countries. It has a wide range of products and high variability of technological processes (450+ form-factors of ropes and 400+ form-factors of steel wire) while operating in a continuous production cycle.

The IT-Enterprise / Clobbi specialists developed a step-by-step digital transformation plan for Stalkanat-Silur taking into account the peculiarities of organizing profitable production within a low-margin industry.

Prerequisites, Concepts & Challenges

The management of Stalkanat-Silur searched for ways to optimize mechanisms of business process management to improve customer focus and reach a new level of customer service, namely:

• Fulfilling orders on a tight schedule;
• Manufacturing highly customized products.

Market demands and customer expectations strictly regulate the interaction between marketeers and set main challenges, namely:

• Keeping prices low in an overall low-margin industry;
• Accurately estimating supply chain timeline;
• Maintaining high-level customer focus.

The enterprise has already used customized but delinked IT solutions based on typical ERP systems and self-created software & services to deal with management issues. However, the set of systems could not meet the ever-growing demands and had problems with data synchronization. Non-integrated systems required a reinforced staff of diverse specialists. Therefore, the management of Stalkanat-Silur had to change the way of running business processes in the future.

"We chose the IT-Enterprise / Clobbi system as it has already made a great reputation in the market and is backed up by a qualified team of integrators with relevant experience for us. This is an easy-to-use solution that we can develop on our own in the future." — Andrii Muksimov, CFO of Stalkanat-Silur production association.

After consulting with the IT-Enterprise / Clobbi project team including engineers, software developers and business analysts, the enterprise kicked off with digital transformation to improve the coordination of production operations. The long-term goal was to create a Smart Factory ecosystem based on Industry 4.0 technologies.

Project Solutions

The Industry 4.0 concept involves creating a single information space for quick interaction between machines (equipment, production devices, personal computers, etc.) and people (managers, specialists, customers, etc.).

Within this concept, IT systems offer optimal solutions letting people have time for more complex, creative tasks.

Roadmap

Internal Roadmap

The project team created at Stalkanat-Silur set up their goals and objectives, developed a plan together with target process models and established interaction rules.

Infrastructure

The infrastructure necessary for the digitalization of processes has been developed.

Business Processes: Step-by-step Algorithm

The IT-Enterprise / Clobbi experts studied the process chain at Stalkanat-Silur to optimize and improve each stage of the production cycle:
— Order processing;
— Managing main raw-material stock;
— Production planning;
— Estimating work center load;
— Assigning production tasks;
— Labor tracking and material accounting;
— Quality control;
— Warehouse and logistics management.

Business Solutions & Industry 4.0

The Industry 4.0 concept is incorporated into business process reengineering carried out in stages using IT business solutions that are part of Clobbi SmartFactory.

Clobbi Cable Designer — development of regulatory technical standards.

Clobbi APS — advanced synchronized planning of production sequence.

Clobbi MES — executive control over production plans.

Clobbi Smart Quality — quality control & management of intermediate and finished products.

Clobbi WMS — inventory and warehousing management.

SmartTender, an e-platform for commercial & government tenders — finding local tenders for transport carriers services.

Clobbi IIoT or Industrial Internet of Things — a system of integrated computer networks and connected industrial (production) facilities with built-in sensors and software for data collection and exchange.

Intermediary Results

Having implemented the solutions based on the Industry 4.0 paradigm, the enterprise now centrally monitors and analyzes online data.

Stalkanat-Silur specialists make decisions based on objective information and are guided by the Manufacturing Execution System (MES) and its infotips.

Considerable workload stemming from developing and altering production sequence schedules is currently the responsibility of the Advanced Planning & Scheduling (APS) that is an advanced synchronized production sequence planning system.

Planners are now working on more creative optimization tasks, varying calculations criteria and interacting with the computer-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems.

"The Clobbi SmartFactory solution allowed Stalkanat-Silur to embark on the digital transformation journey and "level up" the production management system." — Oleksandr Sviderskyi, IT-Enterprise / Clobbi Project Manager.

Results

As a system for managing business processes that uses Industry 4.0 technologies Clobbi SmartFactory has improved a number of indicators.

• 95+% of orders are delivered on term due to high forecasting & production planning accuracy.

Stalkanat-Silur fulfills more orders in a short time at affordable prices and in accordance with international quality standards.

• Improved competitiveness is the result of the solutions by IT-Enterprise / Clobbi optimizing the internal processes such as load scheduling, logistics and resource accounting.

"Regulating business processes has become more transparent and controllable. Now we see the status of each order and the purpose of each ton of intermediate products." — Andrii Muksimov, CFO of Stalkanat-Silur Production Association.

• Time-to-market is reduced by 20+% meaning it takes less time for the product to pass through the process chain stages.
• ~1 Million UAH is saved each year, which is ~3% of the total volume of transport services.
• 27 pieces of equipment are connected to IIoT, which gives an advantage at managing industrial facilities online.

In general, the acceleration of the production cycle allows the enterprise to work more on highly customized orders and manage costs even under low-profit margins.