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This company is one of India’s largest and most technologically advanced integrated steel producers, with an annual crude steel production capacity exceeding 30 million metric tonnes (MTPA). The company operates a robust network of integrated steelworks, downstream processing units, and specialized manufacturing facilities across India. It is the flagship business of a US$ 20+ billion group, that is one of the fastest-growing industrial enterprises in India, with a commercial presence spanning over 100 countries.
To deliver to customer demands of even narrow-width steel rolls and sheets, has invested in world-class metal processing service centres: in-house and through a JV. As a part of the massive Advanced Planning and Scheduling solution deployment project, the company has deployed Greycon’s X-Trim solution across its network of service centres and coated steel plants.
Executive Business Impact
As the mother coil design (MCD) process within the company was manual and fragmented, the business was unable to systematically maximise the active deckle width of its primary rolling mills. Given the massive costs of the steel manufacturing and slitting/cutting infrastructure producing mother coils towards the lower end of the width range of the rolling mills, etc, resulted in lost primary throughput and elevated conversion costs per tonne. Even a fractional increase in width utilisation translated into a substantial annual margin increase.
Operational Limitations
Before implementing X-Trim, the mother coil design (MCD) and slitter planning processes were entirely manual, with planning data maintained across fragmented, site-specific Excel spreadsheets. Although local reports were available, they were disconnected from any centralised optimisation framework. This disconnected environment created several critical operational gaps:
– The Quality Attribute and Production Constraints Matrix: Planners had to iteratively (with SAP-VC) evaluate and align multiple distinct metallurgical, chemical, quality control (QC) attributes together with production constraints across child orders.
– Slow and Inconsistent Planning Cycles: Manually generating cutting configurations was highly time-consuming, making it difficult for planners to evaluate alternative combinations or respond quickly to order modifications.
– Dependence on Planner Experience: Planning quality relied heavily on the personal expertise of individual planners, making operational consistency across shifts and different service plants highly variable.
– System Isolation and Data Silos: The lack of a direct, automated interface to SAP ERP and third-party SCM required planners to manually re-enter slit plans. This created transactional delays, increased data-entry errors, and hampered system-wide traceability.
– Invisible KPIs: The business lacked a structured, automated method to regularly track mother coil width utilisation as a key performance indicator. Without this visibility, improvement opportunities could not be systematically benchmarked, measured, or sustained.
Objective
The objective was to:
1) Improving the quality of the Mother Coil Designing (MCD) process and slitting from stock due to optimisation algorithms, depth of constraint modelling, and multiple other features that X-Trim offers. The quality of the plan would be KPIs like OTIF, better slitter efficiencies/waste minimisation, no. of patterns & knife changes, etc.
2) Provide better decision support through rapid multiple what-if scenarios.
3) Reducing the number of iterations to finalise a plan since many constraints and rules would be factored automatically.
4) Leverage X-Trim’s extensive functionality for slitting from stock to reduce Mother coil inventory at stock yards.
5) The X-Trim application would be integrated with SAP and the CRM application to ensure a smooth end-to-end process from order capture to ISO preparation in SAP, while honouring the Customers’ technical specifications and respecting a highly complex structure of rules and constraints required for mother coil manufacture.
Through this initiative, the company would directly impact primary yield, asset productivity, and downstream conversion costs.
To satisfy the business rigorous requirements, Greycon implemented a centralised, multi-site subscription of X-Trim, its world-class cutting and slitting optimisation system supporting 18 concurrent PPC planners across India.
To address specific technical challenges, Greycon configured a comprehensive suite of X-Trim modules:
1. X-Trim Base Module for Metals: Replaced manual planning with advanced mathematical algorithms designed for mother coil design (MCD) and slitting optimisation, establishing a repeatable and structured planning discipline.
2. Multi-Constant & Variable Diameter Module: Ensured highly accurate optimisation for both variable and constant diameter reel requirements. This allowed the system to generate fully executable cutting plans that respect physical width and weight requirements across multiple customers.
3. Knife Change Minimisation: Utilises advanced pattern-sequencing algorithms to align slitting patterns, minimising knife setups, causing longer machine downtime while maintaining high material yield.
4. Rewinding & Sheeting (Cut-to-Length) Modules: Provided integrated optimisation across slitting and sheeting (CTL) operations, allowing planners to coordinate coil-to-coil and coil-to-sheet processes within a single user interface.
5. Defects & Faults Module: Enabled planners to incorporate real-time coil quality and defect data, dynamically optimising cutting patterns around defect zones to maximise usable material recovery.
6. Stock Conversion Module: Empowered planners to slit directly from available inventory and leftovers, improving stock rotation, reducing the age of stored coils, and lowering working capital requirements.
Seamless Enterprise Integration
A critical factor in the success of the deployment was the seamless integration of X-Trim into the company’s business IT landscape, connecting planning directly with SAP ERP and their CRM. The integration achieved robust, automated data flows through several key components:
– Advanced Quality Attribute Matching & Pre-Processing Rules: Specialised pre-processing rules were engineered to automatically evaluate and match over distinct quality and metallurgical attributes across incoming child orders. Because different child orders carry varying quality and technical parameters, the system ranks and applies complex compatibility rules. This logic determines exactly which orders can be combined into a single mother coil, calculates the final combined physical parameters (such as minimum and maximum weight tolerances), and prevents incompatible quality grades from being mixed. This algorithmic evaluation completely replaced manual, error-prone rules analysis, ensuring that every generated mother coil configuration is technically viable and compliant with strict quality standards.
– Post-Processing Automation: Post-processing properties were implemented to automatically format and append critical execution parameters to the cutting patterns. This ensured that downstream execution and shop-floor manufacturing systems received precise, error-free instructions directly aligned with the optimised plans.
– Direct SAP ERP and CRM Synchronisation: Transactional tables were synchronised directly to allow the automated exchange of orders, stock, and master data. Upon finalising an optimisation run, X-Trim automatically released the completed plans to the CRM (ensuring alignment with orders), triggering the instant creation of Production Orders without manual data entry.
The implementation of X-Trim successfully redefined this company’s planning and slitting operations, standardising optimisation logic across its entire manufacturing and service network. By transitioning from manual, experience-dependent spreadsheet planning to a centralised, automated optimisation framework, the business has established a highly repeatable and scalable operating model.
Achieved Operational & Qualitative Benefits
– Increased Mother Coil Width Utilisation: The most significant benefit of the implementation is the measurable increase (>0.22%) in the average width of the mother coils planned. By algorithmically grouping child orders, X-Trim maximises the active deckle width of the primary mills and increases the output capacity of the rolling lines.
– Reduction in Trim Loss: Moving in tandem with increased width utilisation, trim loss has been systematically minimised (>0.15%). Optimising the cutting patterns across the wider mother coils ensures that edge trim and scrap are kept to an absolute minimum, directly driving up material yield.
– Reduced Planning Cycle Times & Centralised Operations: Complex mother coil design configurations that previously required hours of manual trial-and-error are now generated in minutes. This drastic reduction in cycle time has enabled their planners to devote more time to other value-added activities. It also inculcates a standardised approach for MCD and slitting from stock.
– Optimised Stock and Leftover Utilisation: Planners can systematically identify and consume older remnants and stock coils. This has improved inventory levels and ageing and lowered working capital tied up in slow-moving stock.
– Standardised and Scalable Planning: Planning decisions are now driven by consistent, system-embedded optimisation logic rather than individual planner experience.
– Enhanced System-Wide Traceability: Closed-loop integration with SAP ERP eliminates manual data re-entry. This reduces transactional errors, ensures data integrity, and provides seamless visibility from order capture through execution.
“We are grateful to this company for having entrusted Greycon to provide a solution for the Mother Coil Design requirement. This project was a perfect example of how extraordinary results can be obtained when the customer and vendor work very closely with a defined target. It has been a great pleasure to work with their teams (and with some of their partners for other applications) to deliver a world-class solution addressing a complex process. We continue to work with the team to identify and deliver opportunities for higher value addition”. – Sharad Mittal, Business Partner- India, Greycon.
“X-Trim has made our day-to-day planning process highly intuitive and visual. We can now evaluate multiple optimization scenarios in minutes and handle complex cutting patterns with ease. The system’s ability to minimize waste, reduce knife setups and plan around coil defects has directly improved our operational stability and machine utilization on the shop floor”.
