In all industries over the past decade, competitiveness has meant that meeting tighter tolerances, delivering on time and reducing costs has been the only way of staying in business. These trends in modern manufacturing approaches in the aluminium industry have tended to focus on each manufacturing unit independently and have certainly led to more efficiency but also a degree of isolation of that unit from the process stream. This has reinforced a traditional view that certain key quality parameters are associated with specific process tasks, for example, the control of strip profile is a hot mill issue while control of flatness is a cold mill issue. While this approach allows each unit to gauge its performance, the lack of understanding of the importance of profile control (an upstream process) to finishing operations has prevented optimal final quality from being obtained.
展开▼
