February, 2024- Ever eavesdrop on a group of young people talking about their career paths and hear them say how “metal” it would be to work at a steel service center? Thought not.
“There is a big problem in hiring younger generation talent to just walk the yards all day and run the cranes all day,” says Mudrad Guhya, CEO of eMeasurematics Inc. in Chicago, adding that young workers have been raised with smartphones and other interconnected technology that they expect to use in their leisure and work time. “They know this is not the job they want to do. There’s a lot of attrition.”
Nonetheless, steel service centers can be lucrative profit generators that provide good-paying jobs and are integral to an economy’s health.
With its autonomous products for material handling and expertise in artificial intelligence-driven yard management, eMeasurematics offers a comprehensive way to fully automate and digitize service center yards, according to Guhya. “We offer a big suite of products and a very modular design by which people can plan their expansions and modernizations.”
BEST LEVEL
Four to five different levels are available that service centers can employ to better control their inventories and improve the visibility of their operations, he says. The top level is a fully autonomous, lights-out arrangement where people are not needed to touch anything. “You still have a command center where one person can view the operations and that’s a safety requirement in most places as per guidelines.”
That fully autonomous level comes with a price, Guhya adds, and a service center might merely want to improve inventory tracking. “They want to go digital step one. Digitize it to a level where your operators on the floor have better visibility and they are safer with some kind of safety system.”
Other steps before going lights out (whether that’s even required or desired) include semiautomating material handling and inventory tracking and building a command center, he says. “Our latest offering is where we have a central command center in which we have the whole yard digitized, all their equipment and cranes. It’s an orchestration of the entire material flow.”
With a command center, Guhya says an operator would remain in a comfortable, ergonomically designed room and view the entire operations and direct the equipment from a remote control desk. Service centers would rather avoid having personnel handling steel in areas where they are exposed to heavy equipment and rigging tools. “Because accidents do happen, unfortunately, and that can hurt somebody.”
Guhya compares the desk in a command center to a Sony PlayStation with six big screens. Fifty different cameras throughout a facility might be connected to eMeasurematics’ advanced video management system but it would be a significant strain to watch 50 small screens to see what’s happening in every square foot. “In our system, we have digitized it to a level where operators are shown the views that they need to see for current operations.”
For example, the system detects that a truck has arrived with a load of steel and automatically generates a storage location, he explains. The frame then moves to that location and the operator commands a crane to grab and lower the load or it is lowered in an automated mode. “It semiautomates the whole process, it avoids collisions, it avoids any other accidents, and it improves equipment health because PLCs are controlling the crane instead of humans.”
ALGORITHMS IN ACTION
The company’s automatic material tracking system has an AI engine at its core, which forms the brain of the system, eMeasurematics reports. According to the company, it employs a labyrinthine aggregation of algorithms and mathematical models for steadfast calculations and refactoring of changing yard conditions and the most efficient counteractions.
Noting that eMeasurematics, which has roots dating back about two decades, has been creating automated material tracking systems for many years, Guhya says the company has trained its custom AI modules using a massive quantity of aggregated data gathered over those years. “We have trained our AI modules on how to better optimize the storage, the movement and the delivery, and how to optimize crane time.”
A screenshot of a yard map from eMeasurematics’ eTrax yard management system
He adds that problems arise when inventory is overflowing on either the receiving end or the finished goods side. “When you have less space and more material than you can handle is when this becomes handy, because now the computer and the AI are planning all your storage and retrieval sequences. Our latest versions of the AI optimization modules really help them because a computer thinks much faster than a human and can make hundreds of millions of calculations in a few minutes, which is humanly impossible.”
After eMeasurematics installs a material handling system, Guhya says the company provides roundthe-clock support services. Using a virtual private network, the company can connect to the system to monitor, troubleshoot and repair remotely. “We follow the highest standards of internet security.”
Guhya says eMeasurematics has worked with numerous large steel mills and their captive service center operations to digitally automate their warehouses via project developments and consultation. Although the company has a limited number of system installations in U.S. steel service centers, he notes that the company has had conversations with many of the major companies in the sector and their level of interest is gaining steam.
“We have a big basket of solutions to offer and, in 2024, we are targeting service centers because it was a question of bringing down the cost to a level where it is palatable for the service centers and it makes sense,” Guhya says. “We are at the cusp of technology and time and price where it now makes total sense for all these people to go into this kind of digital transformation. So, not only can you reduce your manpower, but the ROI makes sense now.”
Most customers achieve a return on investment in two to three years, he adds.
As a result of working with big steel mills and their service centers, Guhya says they retain workers displaced by automation and repurpose that talent for more productive activities such as organizing shipments and optimizing lines for cutting, sizing and other processes. “It’s not that people are losing jobs, but they are happier and safer using these control centers.”
eMeasurematics Inc., 312/964-5350, http://emeasurematics.com/
