The Fero platform had more than a glow-up in 2024. We completely transformed its capabilities to better address the issues that engineers experience each day. Fero Diagnostics is at the core of these massive enhancements enabling engineers to pinpoint the cause of issues 90X faster and access recommendations on what they can do about it.
In 2024, Fero Labs undertook the initiative to better understand and address any barriers impacting a plant from running at their ultimate level of efficiency and performance. The answer was more elementary than we had anticipated, but more chronically widespread than most plants had realized: Time.
From Reactive to Proactive
Any time that we asked engineers to describe a typical work day, they described the same thing; so much of their time is reactive. They’re constantly interrupted by unexpected fires that need to be put out which redirect them from their “day job”. These issues require immediate and dedicated attention and constant monitoring to check that the deployed “fix” has worked properly and won’t reoccur.
Our focus was to deliver new capabilities so engineers could fix issues faster and get ahead of anomalies to prevent new issues from occurring. Only then would they have enough bandwidth to focus on process improvements.
Existing Tools Aren't Adequate
The tools used by engineers today are not adequately enabling them to do this. Engineers asked us for more than a visualization tool like Seeq, PiVision, or Trendminr - they wanted to know WHY things happened as well as WHAT they can do about it. In addition, they needed more robust processing power than Minitabs, PowerBI, or Excel could offer.
What we delivered is comprehensive diagnostics capabilities within their Fero process optimization tool so they can streamline the number of solutions that they need to master and use.
Fero Diagnostics is a pivotal tool to assist engineers to:
- Fix process issues faster
- Prevent new issues before they impact production
- Find new ways to improve efficiencies to drive profits and sustainability (#ProfitableSustainability)
Fero Diagnostics is typically used alongside Fero Simulator within a problem solving workflow.
- Fero Diagnostics uses Fero’s Catalyst AI to pinpoint and solve the root cause of a problem in a fraction of time, not just the issue itself. With the help of our Find Similar tool, interactive data visuals, explainable insights, and actionable recommendations, inexperienced engineers and technicians can tap into the historical experience of their entire plant to autonomously fix new issues in minutes rather than days.
- Fero Simulator is a dynamic virtual twin of a production process which can be set up in minutes to identify precise set points for each batch and product. Fero Simulator provides actionable and precise recommendations for users with any level of experience to fix issues faster without over-design margins.
Fero Diagnostics In Action
Senior engineers are not always readily available to provide direction. When an inexperienced quality technician wasn’t confident in pushing a product to a high value grade they made the decision to play it safe. As such, the mill produced lower grade steel that has a lower commercial value. Using Fero Diagnostics, this quality technician is able to work autonomously with greater confidence by accessing precise set points that they can apply to stay in spec without the need to over-design margins.
A senior quality metallurgist always requests that the night crew phone him at home if they’re off-spec on chemistry. There is a sensitive time crunch in this scenario as they have 10-minutes to decide what to do before the batch would need to be poured back. Pour back costs are not insignificant, costing production over $11k. Where they would traditionally reach out to the metallurgist to open an Excel file and give them instructions, using Fero Diagnostics and Simulator enables the engineers to find the new set point without having to call him at 3am.
A major plant used to have to manually pull data for review on all problematic batches. Using Fero, they save hours of time by automating a weekly Fero Alert which is proactively emailed with everything that went wrong.
Another senior manager used to spend two days every week putting together incident reports. He can now do the same thing in Fero using the Find Similar tool in just 10 seconds.
When a team wanted to troubleshoot the source of failed mechanical quality tests, the Melt Shop and Rolling Mill spent 3 weeks going back and forth blaming each other until it finally fell through the cracks. Eventually, an engineer who was testing Fero, ran the analysis on break-outs through Fero Diagnostics and found the culprit within seconds. This type of analysis would typically have taken the engineer an entire day.
It’s easy to argue that constant fire fighting is just part of a typical engineer’s job responsibilities - but it doesn’t have to be this way.
If you have had a Fero demo in the first half of 2024, we encourage you to take a fresh look because a lot has changed.
Do your team a favor, see it for yourself.
Book a demo of Fero Diagnostics today!
