A productivity improvement application for iron and steel companies

As the global competition in iron and steel industry becomes more violent day by day, the steel companies have to convert their costly resources to more and high value added output in order to compete in this severe environment. Because of its strategic importance, not only companies but also governments have developed some national policies. In Turkey, since very high magnitude of main raw materials like iron ore and coke are imported, it is vital to use these resources more efficiently in order to balance the cost rises. To accomplish this, there are some productivity improvement methods whose aim is to eliminate wastes. In essence, all of these methods try to eliminate any activity that doesn?t add value to the product while consuming the resources like labor, material, energy. In the light of this truth, within the context of productivity improvement application, a productivity improvement systematic for the whole of the company was established, productivity improvement teams were formed as the part of this improvement approach and education programs were arranged. Again within this systematic, various productivity improvement methods were selected for various necessities, work study and Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED) techniques among these methods were used as an application. The benefits are assessed by Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) parameter which enlightens improvement areas beyond measuring performance. Finally the computed results are analyzed, two methods are compared and some opinions about future applications are mentioned.