RHI Magnesita is in the final round for the Microsoft Intelligent Manufacturing Award

2020-12-24

Dec. 24, 2020 - RHI Magnesita, the world market and technology leader for refractory products and solutions, is proud to be one of the finalists for the Microsoft Intelligent Manufacturing Award. Microsoft, together with Roland Berger, award leading industry pioneers who have demonstrated excellence through digitalization.

At the beginning of December, RHI Magnesita impressed the judging panel with Automated Process Optimization (APO), a revolutionary digital solution that predicts of the service life of refractory products through artificial intelligence. This significantly increases safety and optimizes production processes, resulting in fewer production losses.

“I am incredibly proud that RHI Magnesita has managed to reach the final round of this prestigious award. Congrats to our passionate digitalization team,” says Stefan Borgas, CEO RHI Magnesita. “Together with strong partners like Microsoft, we strive to further expand the industry’s technology leadership, in developing the best digital solutions for our customers.”

The announcement of the winners  of the Microsoft Intelligent Manufacturing Awards will take place in February 2021. 

Automated Process Optimization (APO): Using data to predict the future

“Extreme temperatures, process cycles, chemical composition: vast amounts of data are generated at every single production step of our customers. These data contains valuable information about how certain high-temperature processes run in their plants,” explains Gregor Lammer, Chief of product APO. This is where Automated Process Optimization (APO) comes in: The system receives all available data of the respective production process. Based on this information, empirical values and previous measurement results, APO uses artificial intelligence to make predictions about how refractories are going to perform, should be maintained, and when they should be renewed.

Conversely, the customer can also instruct the system when scheduled maintenance and inspection work should be carried out, for example to make optimum use of the time between production peaks. In this case, the parameters are specified and APO calculates how the processes must be adjusted to achieve these specifications. This ensures maximum safety and maximum resource efficiency.

RHI Magnesita focusses on digital strategy

From accelerating digital initiatives, improving business processes and optimizing the customer experience to enhancing collaboration and the operation of assets, RHI Magnesita is pursuing a strategy to integrate digital technologies from all areas of their business to leverage the tremendous power of digital technologies. APO is a part of RHI Magnesita’s comprehensive business strategy. 

“Our digitalization journey is helping us achieve our strategic targets. By embracing digital technologies, our business model will greatly enhance, and our competitiveness improves. We took the right decisions and are experiencing the progress we are making with products like APO. The digital transformation not only will have huge benefits but will influence our strategic deliverables significantly”, says Alexander Schillinger, program owner of the Beyond program for the digitalization of RHI Magnesita.