The key question about the modernization project at Hadeed Saudi Iron and Steel was how to prepare a steel plant with legacy equipment that partly dated back to the 1990s for Industrie 4.0, while keeping downtimes to an absolute minimum. Within a short time SMS group had already implemented a state-of-the-art automation infrastructure. The new intelligent analysis tools add leverage to Hadeed’s experience in production management, quality control, and business intelligence, including the perfect integration of pre-existing data into the new fault-tolerant database. Through the collaboration between the metallurgists from Hadeed and SMS group, a wealth of empirical experience was fed into the new self-learning process models. This has resulted in significant cost optimization. To ensure future-proof, recurring returns on investment, SMS group supplied virtualization techniques to give Hadeed independence from specific hardware components as well as great flexibility in spare parts sourcing. As a result, a comprehensive asset life cycle optimization with attractive ROI was achieved with this revamp.
