Broner Metals Solutions

Norandal’s ultra modern, highly automated aluminium foil plant at Huntingdon, Tennessee, USA, uses advanced scheduling and planning solutions from Broner Metals Solutions to optimise output and provide high productivity, flexibility and minimised costs.

$240m Investment

Norandal USA Inc. manufactures aluminium foil products in the North American market with four plants in the United States, including one of the most advanced aluminium production facilities at Huntingdon in Tennessee. This plant, is part of the $240m “Quantum Leap” expansion program, and was designed to use the latest, state-of-the-art technology for casting, rolling and material handling, to provide increased capacity, high quality and lower costs in order to increase market share in a highly competitive market. The plant is designed to produce over 100,000 tonnes per year of heavy gauge aluminium foil using four casters, which cast directly into coils. These coils are then cold-rolled in a six-high, single-stand mill with in-line coil preparation and automated coil handling, spool handling and scrap handling systems to move material from one process to the next. The storage and retrieval system is also fully automated and can handle up to 246 coils weighing up to 23 tons. There is a high speed rolling mill operating at up to 6000 feet per minute producing foil between 54 and 90 inches wide and down to 0.003 inches gauge.

Planning & Scheduling - Automation Requirements

The requirement was to build a fully automated plant, with the latest real-time planning and scheduling solutions that would be integrated directly with the Manufacturing Execution System (MES) and ERP systems and also allow for manual intervention where required. The objectives of the solution are to schedule coils through the production processes and equipment while balancing production constraints with customer needs and minimum cost goals. The coils are cast in the largest possible dimensions, and are then rolled several times in order to reach the required gauge, together with passes through the annealing furnace to counter the effects of work hardening, before finally being cut to customer coil size at the slitters. Norandal required full visibility of customer orders during production, including their physical location within the production process and the stage of production, in order to improve customer service. Trim Optimisation was one of the most important requirements, as this would allow Norandal to provide the maximum number of orders per coil with faster delivery times, fewer remnants and less scrap.

Solution Description

Norandal chose a specialised metals industry solution, from Broner Metals Solutions comprising four component products - Material Planner, Allocation Editor, Production Scheduler and Schedule Editor, which offered particular advantages in the areas of MES integration and Trim optimisation.
For each cast coil that is manufactured, the Material Planner automatically allocates, previously unallocated or new customer orders to that coil, and produces the cutting plan. It groups together orders based on alloy, final gauge and similar coil diameter, then starting from the most important order based on due date and priority, it uses a set of user defined rules to obtain the best fit based on business objectives. It then sends details of the allocated orders and the cutting plan to the MES.

The Allocation Editor allows manual editing of this cutting plan by allocating or de-allocating orders from the plan. The diagram shows the cutting plan that has been produced by the Material Planner. Each rectangle identified by an order number is the final coil required for that order with the red line indicating the minimum and maximum length variation allowed. If a manual change is needed, then this is easily performed from this screen. For example if a defective quality coil has been produced then a replacement for this could be produced by re-allocating production from one customer to another.

Cutting plan optimises allocation of orders

The Production Scheduler handles the detailed sequencing of orders through all the rolling and finishing equipment using optimisation algorithms to provide a synchronised schedule of operations for all customer orders on all machines throughout the whole plant. The Production Scheduler balances the operational rules and constraints of each machine, and the available and scheduled inventory, against the priorities of each order, to produce a schedule that minimises production costs and maximises delivery performance. The schedule may be optimised according to plant defined rules that may vary the priorities given for example between maximising throughput, maximising on-time delivery, or minimising cost.

The resulting schedule is displayed using the Schedule Editor, allowing experienced human schedulers to make amendments in order to respond rapidly to minor disruptions to the schedule execution, for example, to schedule a new and urgent customer order.

Schedule of rolling and annealing processes

The screen shows the schedule of coils through the cold-rolling mill. The vertical bars show each coil passing through the mill and its rolling width, and below that the gauge. They are identified by different colours according to the annealing process (Practice) applied to each coil.

These solutions are closely integrated with the ERP and MES systems. The ERP system supplies customer order details together with product and routing details. Schedules, material requirements and cutting plans feed into the MES which provides feedback of detailed production status such as coils started, completed and scrapped.

Results

The result is a fully integrated, automated operation. The ‘new coil’ allocation is run as required, but in addition Norandal is able to re-run the entire coil allocation for all coils, in order to take advantage of any improvements that could be made by re-allocating customer orders.

The new plant started production in 2001 and is increasing in capacity with the ramp-up of operations, which is expected to take 5 years. The new capacity and the fact that it is produced on the most up-to-date and most efficient plant, has allowed Norandal to significantly decrease costs and increase market share, and also made it possible to enter new markets.

Bob Clayton, the Project Director in charge of this major investment programme said, "Broner was our system of choice to meet our objectives and we have been pleased with the results."