Effort aimed to enhance manufacturing efficiency and product quality

Jindal Stainless Limited (JSL), India’s largest stainless steel manufacturing company, has successfully completed level-2 process automation for its Argon Oxygen Decarburization (AOD) converter at its Jajpur plant in Odisha. The automation process has helped the Company achieve ~ 10% improvement in productivity with the help of real-time carbon and temperature analysis during production. This process was completed in a short span of two weeks with Primetals Technologies Limited as the implementation partner. This is the second digital transformation adopted by the Company after last year’s migration to SAP BW/4HANA.

Commenting on this development, Managing Director, JSL, Mr Abhyuday Jindal said, “This automation process is a part of our continuous endeavour to attain better operational efficiency and offer improved product quality to our customers by adopting breakthrough technology. We will continue our efforts to migrate our manufacturing ecosystem towards 100% digital avatar that would unlock enormous value for JSL and its partners.”

The upgraded AOD converter will improve overall refining operations at the facility. Level-2 process automation is a dynamic process model which will allow both, advance calculations and online simulation of processes. Advance calculations shall result in trimming errors significantly as input materials will be prepared in advance. This dynamic process model is based on dozens of metallurgical equations which use cyclic online calculations to analyse the chemical reaction in the AOD converter both, in real time and at a point in future. This improves the process accuracy and the quality of the stainless steel produced. The upgrade will also help in collating a valuable knowledge database for use in future optimisations and new developments.

AOD process is used worldwide to primarily produce stainless steel and other high-grade alloys. The process filters out carbon and other impurities to achieve better product quality. JSL has been operating its AOD converter since 2011. The newly upgraded level-2 system offers a large number of interfaces and is now integrated with the existing technological set-up at JSL.

In early 2019, Jindal Stainless had become an early adopter of SAP BW/4HANA, one of the world’s fastest data warehouse and reporting systems. This transition helped the organization reduce the time taken for real time inventory reporting from 30 minutes to just a minute. In April 2017, Jindal Stainless had undertaken a digital revolution by upgrading its ERP applications and migrating to the HANA database on Cloud. It enabled business transactions and report analysis to become 10 to 15 times faster.