By David Staelens, Manager of I.T. for New
Hartford and Dunkirk, Special Metals Corp.
Background
The Special Metals Corporation group of companies
was created in the latter part of 1998 when
Special Metals Corporation of New Hartford,
New York, acquired Inco Alloys International,
including its Huntington Alloys and Wiggin Alloys
divisions. In 2006, Special Metals Corporation
became a part of Precision Castparts Corp.,
a worldwide manufacturer of complex metal components
and products. With a history of alloy technology
now going back some 100 years, the company continues
to provide solutions to difficult materials
problems through such time-tested products as
world-recognized INCONEL, INCOLOY, NIMONIC,
UDIMET, MONEL and NILO alloys.
Today's Special Metals is a world leader in
the invention, production and supply of the
high-nickel, high-performance alloys used for
the difficult jobs in engineering. These alloys
are highly engineered to offer a superior combination
of heat resistance, high-temperature corrosion
resistance, toughness and strength and are used
in the world's most technically demanding industries
and applications. Special Metals offers the
largest range of nickel alloys and product forms,
as well cobalt alloys, to more than ten worldwide
markets. We produce nickel alloys in all standard
mill forms, from large ingots and billets to
plate, sheet, strip, tubing, bar and wire, the
latter of which includes core and filler wires
for welding products. The company has manufacturing
and research facilities in the USA and Europe,
sales offices in North America, Europe and Asia,
and a distribution network including most of
the industrialized countries of the world.
Problem Statement
Special Metals is a heavily data driven company,
with SPC reporting, yield tracking and improvements,
and other various financial, quality, and manufacturing
data. Various types of applications are used
for this reporting, ranging from Excel, to Minitab,
to SAS. The various tools fragmented the data
and reporting even further, and made sharing
of the reports and data difficult, and the ability
to have a new person carry on an existing report
nearly impossible. Tools such as SAS, while
extremely powerful, are so large and complex
that heavy investments in training are required,
along with steep licensing fees once you move
away from the base SAS configuration. Also,
with data coming from various sources such as
Oracle Quality, flat files or Microsoft Office
files and other manufacturing databases, pumping
data into SAS data sets quickly becomes an I.T.
issue. Also, with transferring data into SAS,
or other reporting tools, it becomes difficult
to react to an issue on the spot, leaving many
times an issue to be silent until it's too late.
The Statit Solution
The Statit
e-QC software has allowed Special Metals
to begin reporting from a common toolset, with
the ease-of-use for a point-and-click type interface,
to the full blown power of a macro programming
language to truly get into the nuts and bolts
of the system. The tool allows engineers to
build and prototype their reports from any delimited
file source, ODBC compliant database, or even
exported SAS data sets, and from the various
data sources at once. The output is then a unified
look and feel for everyone, without worrying
if they have UNIX window emulators installed,
licenses for just viewing, or other issues with
third party software. The software is flexible
enough to handle just about anything we can
dream up, and the Statit support team has been
phenomenal with rapid responses and examples
of how to pull off some of the harder issues.
Many charts that the engineers were doing by
hand daily in Excel or by paper are now automated
and will notify them in real-time of an issue.
Work is in progress to integrate the reports
within our shop floor application which will
alert workers, as well as engineers, immediately
of issues so they can react in real-time, instead
of after the fact.
