Ability to unlock multiple benefits revealed

ABB has launched its Ability Performance Optimisation Service for cold rolling mills. This is said to offer steel, aluminium and other metals manufacturers opportunities to reach new levels of operational performance through technology, boosting their processes and profitability.

The new service – part of ABB’s metals digital portfolio and Collaborative Operations for Metals suite – combines continuous performance monitoring, using ABB Ability Data Analytics for cold rolling mills, with real-time support from ABB experts.

The data analytics component employs process-specific algorithms, based on a century of metals domain expertise, to collect high-frequency data from mill control systems, and discover trends, benchmarks and other performance factors, sending alerts to operators and maintenance when opportunities to optimise performance are identified.

Performance targets

Alongside this, ABB experts are available to provide onsite or offsite support, recommending actions to ensure the mill maintains its performance targets against key performance indicators (KPIs) for productivity, quality and yield. Leveraging the collective strengths of metals producers and ABB experts, access to dashboards is shared, enabling all parties to drill down to individual coil level.

Also, ABB experts can provide customers with detailed reports at regular intervals, says the company, describing areas for improvement, identified trends or problem areas found in historical data, allowing for continuous improvement over time.

“Our deep understanding of the pain points experienced by cold rolling mill operators is the foundation of this solution,” states Andreas Vollmer, global technology manager, ABB Metals. “For example, the timeline and chronological analysis capability identifies deterioration, or other trends, at a glance. This highlights the root cause of issues in real time against any KPIs to the last coil, as well as enabling secondary analysis of KPIs chronologically for any coil.”

Most advanced

Comments Nilabja Ash, global product manager, Metals Service, ABB Metals: “This is our most advanced performance optimisation technology yet, with greater capabilities to automatically detect, analyse, predict and prevent failures than existing solutions.

It has the potential to significantly improve the ability to spot trends and relationships between different process parameters, overcome quality issues, reduce unscheduled downtime and reach higher levels of productivity, quality, yield in cold rolling mills than ever before.

“As a technology leader, we will continue to improve on this service," adds Ash. "Working closely with customers enables us to directly understand emerging trends and issues. We have a long-standing and proven commitment to innovation and as a team we’re looking forward to seeing ABB Ability Performance Optimization Service for cold rolling mills make tangible impacts.”

Key benefits are listed as: continuous collaboration and access to experts; increased productivity through improved asset performance and reduced downtime; higher yield and quality resulting from immediate corrective action when problems occur; reduced risk of equipment failure; the ability to leverage insights across the enterprise; and reductions in wastage, energy and other costs.