Lately, Beijing Shougang Co., Ltd. won the “Best Practice Award in Intelligent Manufacturing” at the 11th China Intelligent Manufacturing Summit Forum and 19th China Intelligent Manufacturing Inventory at the End of the Year. Previously, the scene of “Quality Control in the Whole Steel-making Process” at Shougang was selected for inclusion in the sub-list of “Excellent Scenes of Intelligent Manufacturing”, part of the list of “Listed Units and Excellent Scenes of Demonstration Factories in Intelligent Manufacturing in 2021” released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. These two great honors indicate that Shougang is gradually becoming the “exporter” and “leader” of the best practices of digital transformation in the industry.

Shougang actively promotes digital transformation and intelligent manufacturing, and improves the intelligence level, optimizes the resource utilization, improves the quality and efficiency, and promotes the high-quality development of enterprises through the deep application of digital technology. To further enhance its capability of “manufacturing + service”, Shougang put forward the task objectives of “improving quality” and “improving quality and efficiency”, and confirmed the main direction of “ensuring the quality of products from the outside, stabilizing the internal control of quality and adhering to two-wheel innovation driven by science and technology and management”. A digital quality control platform for the whole steel process has emerged over time, presenting new perspectives and solutions for breaking the bottleneck of quality control and breaking through the blocking point of quality improvement.

The construction of Shougang’s whole-process quality control platform completely fills in the gap in quality process control, realizes the monitoring, adjustment, judgment, prediction, inspection and treatment of the whole process from the input of molten steel to the output of finished products, realizes the integrated closed-loop quality control of the whole process, improves product stability, effectively solves the problem of the real-time sharing of upstream and downstream quality information, and reduces cost losses. The digital quality control platform covers the collection and conversion of data from more than 10,000 processes and pieces of equipment, including 21 production units, 59 production processes and more than 6,500 devices. The quality judgment and early warning of the whole process are realized through advanced technologies such as online detection, machine learning and data modeling, which greatly improve the efficiency and accuracy of quality process control; the automatic classification of defects such as recognition, classification, feature extraction and combination of surface defects can be completed through AI image recognition technology instead of manual judgment; and the accurate and convenient correspondence and traceability analysis of the evolution of surface defects in the whole process can be realized through the hereditary tracing of surface quality defects across processes, which helps to quickly lock the location and causes of sources for defects.

These two great honors in the field of quality control are just two individual cases among Shougang’s many digital transformation scenarios. Exploring digital applications in more fields and further improving its new overall digital capability will be Shougang’s main tasks during the period of the “14th Five-year Plan”.