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Stalkanat-Silur boasts the largest range of metal products in Ukraine and is one of the leaders in the Eastern European market. The company's capacity allows it to produce more than 60,000 tons of products per year including steel rope and wire, PC strands, fiber and slings. There are more than 850 types of form-factors manufactured by the company.

The wide range of products gives the enterprise its competitive edge but also poses some challenges. The specialists from IT-Enterprise / Clobbi collaborated with Stalkanat-Silur to create a system allowing flexible planning and reaching production targets while featuring wide output diversity. Such a system can let the company quickly adapt to market developments and specific customer requirements.

Prerequisites, Concepts & Challenges

It was critical for Stalkanat-Silur to maintain a client-oriented approach to business. In order to do this, the company had to tackle the following challenges:

• Maintaining competitive prices;
• Meeting high quality standards;
• Delivery schedule adherence;
• Service responsiveness;
• Commitment to take on custom orders.

The system of end-to-end control of business processes and their efficiency can cope with these challenges. The IT-Enterprise / Clobbi team is well-experienced in developing and implementing solutions of such level. Below is the scope of work done this time for Stalkanat-Silur.

Project Solutions

IT-Enterprise / Clobbi specialists reviewed the production conditions and developed a plan to increase the efficiency of each individual area using Industry 4.0 technologies and Smart Factory conception.

Unification of  Regulatory Technical Standards

The system by IT-Enterprise / Clobbi gives everyone involved in the production process access to the real-time digital data that are timely updated online. A single resource classifier covers both finished / semi-finished goods and raw materials. Moreover, users have access to up-to-date data on the bill of materials, technical processes and standards.

Tool: Clobbi Cable Designer

Clobbi Cable Designer solution allows specialists to accurately estimate the lead time and resource requirements for each order. It significantly speeds up the process of writing a business proposal and choosing an appropriate production plan.

Advanced Planning & Scheduling and Workload Optimization

Advanced Planning & Scheduling, or APS, solves two tasks at once:
— Quickly develops a realistic production schedule with appropriate workload distribution at work centers;
— Improves production processes efficiency by reducing the costs associated with waste and reprocessing of substandard semi-finished goods.

Tool: Clobbi APS

The solution helps to plan out the entire stock of orders with great detail to individual operations.

Clobbi APS automatically generates different sequences of operations taking into account deadlines, priorities and available resource constraints. The results of these calculations are compared with one another based on the determined KPI.

With daily planning meetings out of the picture, the shop floor supervisors at Stalkanat-Silur can focus on developing alternative routings.

Automated Task & Plan Monitoring

With the implementation of mobile solutions synchronized with the Manufacturing Execution System or MES, the production plan performance was significantly improved. Each employee receives through their smartphone or tablet a work order and comprehensive data for its timely completion.

Tool: Clobbi MES

The Clobbi MES solution provides easy access to structured order information such as product quantity, lead-time, technical requirements, packaging requirements, materials requirements, semi-finished goods requirements, and more.

The user-friendly interface allows everyone with basic computer skills to work with such tools.

Output Report and Optimizing Cost Accounting

IT-Enterprise / Clobbi solutions simplify cost accounting and improve scheduling for the next shift. Based on the tasks list from MES and QR-scan data they automatically generate an online report on such accounting operations as:
— Production of finished and semi-finished goods;
— Write-off of raw materials and semi-finished goods when registering each batch;
— Processing semi-finished goods deviations / defects;
— Transfer of resources between production centers.

Stalkanat-Silur no longer requires separate staff for shop floor accounting since each employee fills in all the necessary data based on which the system can fully manage cost accounting.

Quality Control of Main Raw Material & Finished Products

Connecting technical control laboratories to the IT-Enterprise / Clobbi ecosystem allowed exporting to the shop floor immediate data on the compliance of raw materials with the requirements of a specific order. Moreover, the synchronization of quality control tools with the supplier's labeling system further speeds up production planning. In particular, information on raw materials from reliable certified suppliers appears in the planning system as early as during their shipment.

Tool: Industrial Internet of Things, IIoT

The digital transformation also improved the efficiency of the quality control department.

Solutions based on the Industrial Internet of Things or IIoT let Stalkanat-Silur monitor the quality of semi-finished goods online without any extra staff. Total control over each batch enabled switching from selective monitoring of deviations / defects to analyzing trends regarding work centers, operations and staff.

Results

The transformation of Stalkanat-Silur's production according to the principles of Industry 4.0 contributed to the optimization of each stage of manufacturing.

• 2x faster pre-production planning due to regulatory technical standardization.

"Using Clobbi Cable Designer made the standardization process for new products several times faster," Andrii Muksimov, CFO of Stalkanat-Silur Production Association.

• Only 2 minutes to create and approve the characteristics of technological processes for a new form factor type.

"It takes only a few minutes to bring a product with a changed diameter into production and it takes a few hours to develop a completely new product." — Andrii Muksimov, CFO of Stalkanat-Silur Production Association.

• 20-50% faster throughput and more efficient use of business assets after the introduction of advanced planning & scheduling (MES).

"After Clobbi APS implementation we assessed the workload of our work centers and increased it by 20-50% on average." — Andrii Muksimov, CFO of Stalkanat-Silur Production Association.

• 100% online accounting helped to halve and control work-in-progress.

"Instead of wasting a day and the efforts of a few people, it only takes a tablet and a few seconds now to get information from the IT-Enterprise / Clobbi system. The data on process accounting being available helped us to reduce work-in-progress and overstocking by 22 times." — Andrii Muksimov, CFO of Stalkanat-Silur Production Association.

• Improved customer focus due to adopting an analytical basis for the development of quality control tools.

"With Clobbi Smart Quality we switched to the total quality control to reduce the number of any possible complaints." — Andrii Muksimov, CFO of Stalkanat-Silur Production Association.

All the solutions implemented at Stalkanat-Silur coordinate their work within the integrated IT-Enterprise / Clobbi ecosystem. Simultaneously, they display great ability for business scaling and customization while using the enterprise’s own resources, which was one of the client's key requirements.