“Also building on a global footprint of experience is Greycon Ltd., London, which is a fairly recent entrant into providing optimization strategies specific to the metals industry by focusing on select finishing facilities, particularly in tube and pipe mills, and on a wide range of metals service centers and distributors. “These plants, particularly those providing value-added services, have processes that are sequence-dependent with higher set up times and are faced with stock control or customer services challenges,” said Abder Guezour, vice president of global sales. He said Greycon is “working with these plants on performance optimization and on achieving the balance between production efficiency, inventory levels, customer service levels, quality, transportation and logistics costs.”
Greycon’s Guezour points to the increasing trend of marrying process optimization and information technology solutions and overlays. “While some clients approach IT solutions as overlays, others view IT applications in distinct silos specific to certain types of processes or machines. Therefore, they can capture the low-hanging fruit and see immediate benefits before moving to the next steps in the process and eventually to an enterprise-wide solution. However, IT installations need to be treated carefully as they can fail by taking longer than anticipated to install, not being on budget or not delivering the expected benefits,” he said.
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