Mining News Pro - In the first week of Jul’18, South Korea’s POSCO ICT, a subsidiary of steel giant POSCO announced to supply unmanned cranes and cranes control system to continuous casting mill and hot rolling mill of Shougang Jingtang United Iron & Steel (SJUIS) in Hebei province, China.
SJUIS has been annually producing 9.7 MnT of automotive grade steel, pipe steel, and surface treated steel sheets among others since 2009.
Using POSCO’s technology, SJUIS will be able to automate the logistics system and build an unmanned factory. According to the reports, the Chinese steelmaker will be able to lay the foundation for evolving into a smart factory that collects, analyzes, and predicts various data generated at production and logistics sites, and automatically controls facilities based on collected data. In July 2017, POSCO ICT has also supplied an unmanned crane system for a waterfront warehouse of SJUIS.
Global companies such as Schneider in Germany and Danieli in Italy participated in the auction, but POSCO ICT was awarded the project in recognition of its technological prowess. POSCO ICT is an IT and engineering service provider that designs and maintains IT systems usually for its parent company and other steel mills.
Chinese companies increasing interest towards developing smart factories
Chinese steelmakers have been playing close attention to build smart factories, with the Chinese government having announced its plan for the restructuring of the sector in 2015 in order to deal with a supply glut and help improve its competitiveness.
POSCO ICT provided consulting services to establish a master plan for the entire system for building the Rizhao Steel production base in China.
In 2015, Hebei Steel Group signed a technical cooperation agreement with POSCO ICT so that the latter can diagnose the processing systems of Tangshan Iron & Steel, one of its subsidiaries, and establish smart factory systems for it before spreading them to the other 15 subsidiaries.
In this context, POSCO ICT set up automatic cranes in Tangshan Iron & Steel recently. POSCO ICT is scheduled to receive royalties and provide techniques so that similar cranes can be built for the entire Hebei Steel Group. Also, it kicked off a project for real-time production monitoring and control.