Leading Italian carbon and stainless-steel producer Marcegaglia and international engineering group Fives have reached an agreement to install Eyeron®, an intelligent quality management system, at the former’s Ravenna plant in Italy.
Eyeron® is a digital quality improvement solution developed by Fives for steelmakers. It tracks all process steps, quality events and production information across the workshops and automatically qualifies products in real time with a view to improving efficiency and quality control. Marcegaglia wanted to upgrade its quality control systems to account for diverse customer requirements, it is claimed.
Michele Manaresi, quality manager at Marcegaglia Ravenna, commented: “Due to a wide upstream diversity and a multitude of end-customer requirements, we were looking for an intelligent solution to ensure the best quality and substantially reduce the rate of downgraded coils. Eyeron® will be installed throughout the Ravenna plant to bring our production process and quality management to a higher level.”
The project consists of several key phases. The first took place in 2024, when a pilot solution was implemented at the plant. In addition to the initial functionality of Eyeron®, the pilot solution enabled real-time quality process alarms to be generated, allowing operators to correct quality deviations and increase the number of first-time, first-choice coils, it is claimed.
“Due to a wide upstream diversity and a multitude of end-customer requirements, we were looking for an intelligent solution to ensure the best quality and substantially reduce the rate of downgraded coils."
Michele Manaresi, quality manager at Marcegaglia Ravenna.
The project is now moving into phase two, which involves data collection, rule enforcement, and dashboard customization for the entire plant to consolidate process and quality-related information on a single device.
Data collection is essential to support the quality rules that allow the assessment of products’ conformity with the end customer’s criteria and propose corrective actions to maximise the rate of qualified products. Data can be analysed remotely by all users from any mobile device or computer.
At Fives, Laurent Lesne, vice president of steel digital development and operations, said: “Thanks to the collaborative environment we share with Marcegaglia Ravenna’s quality and IT departments, we are able to fully customize Eyeron® to their benefit. We look forward to continuing our collaboration by training the operators to adapt the solution to their needs to achieve the maximum benefits that Eyeron® has to offer.”
According to Fives, this will be the second breakthrough digital solution that the company has supplied to Marcegaglia in recent years. SmartLineTM, a fully automatic control system for enhanced coil processing, has been installed on four galvanizing lines and has been delivering outstanding results since 2021.