North Star Steel engineers change in its manufacturing process

North Star Steel is saving hundreds of thousands of dollars each year by simplifying access to engineering documents.

Part of industrial giant Cargill, North Star Steel is the second largest minimill steel producer in the United States. Each year seven North Star mills nationwide process 3 million tons of steel scrap steel ranging in origin from junked cars to old bridges.

North Star also produces mountains of documentation -- nearly 40,000 documents and drawings at each mill, detailing manufacturing projects, plant specifications, plans for changes, and quality assurance. At most North Star mills, these engineering documents were stored in buildings adjacent to each mill. In a process that could take 15 minutes up to an hour, someone had to go next door, pull the relevant document (knowing the engineering filing system) and return it to the shop floor.

Quality assurance and engineering group at North Star's Michigan plant were working with local IT people to solve the problem, which upon further analysis was quickly identified as a corporate-wide problem. The project was moved out of Michigan's hands and expanded to all seven locations. Bobby Redden, senior IT technical analyst in North Star's Kentucky mill, was handed the reigns.

Redden soon discovered the scope of the problem, which he estimated happened somewhere among North Star's mills at least once a day. "All mills were doing basically the same thing," he said. "Maintenance people actually had to stop, leave the area, go to a different building and go through drawers to find drawings," he said. In some cases mill production had to be halted altogether until specific documents or drawings could be found.

In February 1999, after meeting with several engineers and quality groups, North Star began testing a document management system in use at the Michigan plant. But the flat-file system couldn't handle the "many to one, one to many" relationships between documents required for North Star. Also, given the precision of North Star's manufacturing process, revision control was a top priority. "We had to ensure everyone was looking at the same document, not one someone had saved on their hard drive or stuck in a file cabinet that had changed," said Redden.

North Star then heard about a new system being used by parent company Cargill. The company quickly put a status-quo on the original vendor's testing, and began looking at the new one -- Intranet Solutions' Intra.doc! system. Within a month North Star's Quality Assurance group was brought in to plead their case, and another month the Intra.doc system was OK'd.

Those same engineering documents are now just a PC away. "Just go to nearest terminal, pick out the document related to this area, and view it on screen," said Redden. "Anyone with a browser can use it." North Star estimates the system will cut project costs by 40%, and save $150,000 with fewer stoppages in production time. Redden admits that anticipated ROI won't be as quick as the aggressive installation. "We told our corporate people it would be around three years," said Redden, a figure which has since been revised to two years. Redden didn't reveal the cost of the system, but said it was in the neighborhood of $60,000 less than the original vendor.

The only real problem North Star has encountered, according to Redden, has been trying to limit the system's scope. "Every department that sees it has an application for it," he said, including groups in finance/accounting, scheduling and IT departments. "Demand for additional applications is growing faster each day as we continually find new uses," agreed Todd Schnobrich, North Star's director of IT. Redden plans to hold other departments back until North Star gets Intra.doc talking with a newly-installed maintenance purchasing management application, as well as the company's ERP system.

For now, the system is only available to supervisors, who "love it," according to Redden. "They don't have to learn the engineering hierarchy of how stuff is stored, or where it is. A full-text search lets them use basic description." The next step is to extend the system to the shop floor, where 2500-3000 workers will be able to access the documents from their desktops.

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