A million tons of steel

WIREPAS PARTNER CASE

D4 INDUSTRY FOR TOSYALI TOYO

Our partner, D4 Industry, supplies cutting edge steel coils produced for a wide range of industries, from packaging industry to white goods, automotive to electrical household appliances, IT products to construction sector and are all specific to the end user needs.

Turkey’s first state-of-the-art value-added flat steel producer Tosyali Toyo started commercial production in 2017 from a new site spanning 250,000 m² in the Osmaniye Organized Industrial Zone. With products meeting the demands not only in Turkey but also in a region spanning Europe, Caucasus, the Middle East and North Africa, the plant has a rolling capacity of 1 million tons.

CHALLENGE

Large scale logistics in a tough environment

The enormous task of manually addressing all work in process, finished goods and raw materials in the vast stockyards highlighted inefficiencies using cranes, forklifts and operators. Because of the ongoing process of movement of the coils, there were always a number of coils missing from their location as they had been repositioned while handling other coils in shipment or production.

Inevitably this led to long loading times for trucks because of search and find activities inside the stockyard. But also time losses on the production side for finding the right raw material or work in process material as operators would go inside the stock area to continuously address coils on daily basis. Not to mention inventory counting that had to be carried out by large numbers of operators working physically on the field.

This kind of industrial environment filled with steel materials and big machinery has been considered extremely hard for wireless tracking systems as there are continuous reflections and unstable signal levels. But those problems stemmed from the age well before Wirepas.

SOLUTION

Making the steel coils talk

Our friends at D4 Industry quickly realized that solving this problem required the use of Wirepas connectivity for end-to-end tracking of the steel coils and sheets, starting from the entry of raw material to shipment of the finished products.

The system permits digital asset tracking of steel coils and sheets in the form of raw material, work in process and finished goods used for automatic location tracking for material handling and shipment operations plus inventory counting.

The smart tracking system includes nearly 30.000 asset tags and IoT devices being used without interference in an extremely difficult environment. It entails more than 30 industrial cranes and forklifts and an advanced color-coding system for easy handling and safety when stacking.

RESULTS

Game changing benefits

In manufacturing, cutting time is the big winner. For Tosyali Toyo, the D4 Industry solution based on Wirepas technology proved easy to deploy and extremely cost efficient. It optimized crane movements to greatly reduce the time needed for operators to find and handle the correct steel coils. And by automatically addressing all products inside the factory, it removed the waste time spent on manual addressing operations. Crane operators can now load the trucks without the need of ground operators for each loading. So the end user trucks are also spending less time waiting for their shipments.

From the employee’s point of view, worker safety and satisfaction has been greatly improved by minimizing the need for anyone to enter the stock areas, with much less time spent on search and find operations without physically entering the stock areas. Traceability and performance optimization has created new possibilities for the crane and forklift operations, while the entire shipment operations has found large gains in efficiency and control. The system also offers a platform for other industry 4.0 projects inside the factory with the infrastructure in place allowing for the implementation of many new business cases.