Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works (MMK) has upgraded its system for optimising sales and production planning, which now covers the company’s entire production cycle.
Thanks to the upgrade, MMK’s production in the areas of sinter, coke, blast-furnace, smelting and rolling has been integrated into a single digital system. The system also integrates the company’s processes involved in building an optimal sales portfolio focused on profitability, maximizing production capacity and meeting the needs of MMK’s key customers.
In addition, the planning system has been expanded to include MMK’s integrated system called Optimal Pig Iron for the proactive management of sinter, coke and blast-furnace production. The latter includes seven modules that optimize the purchase of basic feedstocks and production technology as well as the production cost of cast iron, sinter and coke. The system takes into account parameters and metrics that are used for all units involved in the steelmaking process as well as parameters and metrics that are specific to a particular blast furnace, which are made more precise during operation with the help of machine learning. All planning results are produced automatically for every possible production volume of pig iron.
As part of the system upgrade, three more group companies that further process and sell metal products, including MMK-METIZ, MMK-LMZ and MMK Trading House, were added to the integrated planning system.
The company’s shared information space for managing business processes and preparing drill-down analytical reports (in-depth data analysis) was developed with the help of mathematical modelling. As a result, the time required to prepare the data for calculating optimal plans for MMK and other Group companies was reduced from eight hours to four. In addition, the system has automated the process for preparing data on feedstocks and other materials used in the production of steel and pig iron. The system creates an end-to-end consolidated plan as well as individual plans for the above-mentioned companies.
Further development of the system will be aimed at expanding both its functionality and the methods it uses for analyzing plans and working with data. In the future, other group companies involved in metals production will also be integrated into the system.
