biscoPro Beam – Steltech Structural Ltd
Background
Steltech Structural is a manufacturer of three plate steel welded beams based in Auckland New Zealand and owned by New Zealand Steel who in turn are owned by BlueScope Steel Ltd. Their main product is welded three plate "I" beams that compete with imported hot rolled steel sections.
Their value proposition is being able to engineer optimised structures by designing custom beams for specific applications making them lighter and more efficient than the mass produced standard sizes.
The beam parts are cut from steel plate manufactured by NZ Steel using CNC cutting machines and then machine or hand welded into their final shape.
Operating since 1986 the main business system was an in house developed access database for job management. Drawing and production information was almost entirely paper based.
After a major strategy review NZ Steel decided to change to out an sourced production model requiring improvement management and communication between the three businesses now involved in designing and producing the beams.
The Need
The change to outsourced manufacturing and cutting suppliers means that communication between the parties becomes critical to ensure that the product is made to specification and on time. The paper based system would not cut it.
Steel waste is a major cost factor due to the custom nature of the product so improving this will significantly impact on the business profitability. The cutting machinery operators made the plate usage and cutting decisions by manually inputting the cut patterns into the cutting machines. A difficult task to do optimally by hand.
Steltech also wanted to understand the costs and pricing for each job. Their existing system used standard prices and costs so could not accurately determine the profitability of each job.
The Solution
After reviewing alternative solutions Steltech decided to work with bisco to develop a customised version of their biscoPro system to manage their process from quoting to production electronically.
The biscoPro implementation allows them to model the beams in 3D, optimise the plate requirement, accurately price job, and manage the relationships with the external partners.
The system allows them to produce the production information including drawings, cutting lists, and parts labels. It also tracks the plate inventory at batch level from receipt to final production including tracing plate remnants.
With the custom developed 3D Beam Tool Steltech has easy to used input wizards to allow users to accurately detail the beams. The beam tool outputs the shape information to the optimiser for planning the cutting and creates PDFs drawings of the beams.
The change has allowed Steltech to:
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Cut its the plate wastage by about half potentially adding over $500,000 to their bottom line
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Reduce the number of errors cause by humans having to interpret paper information
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Proceed with their plan to outsource their manufacturing operations with confidence
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Accurately track and identify the batch numbers of the materials used in each beam
