Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!news.cs.indiana.edu!arizona.edu!arizona!rick Newsgroups: comp.research.japan Subject: Kahaner Report: Nippon Steel Kimitsu Works Message-ID: <838@optima.cs.arizona.edu> From: rick@cs.arizona.edu (Rick Schlichting) Date: 19 Mar 91 16:56:14 GMT Sender: rick@cs.arizona.edu Approved: rick@cs.arizona.edu Lines: 333 [Dr. David Kahaner is a numerical analyst visiting Japan for two-years under the auspices of the Office of Naval Research-Asia (ONR/Asia). The following is the professional opinion of David Kahaner and in no way has the blessing of the US Government or any agency of it. All information is dated and of limited life time. This disclaimer should be noted on ANY attribution.] [Copies of previous reports written by Kahaner can be obtained from host cs.arizona.edu using anonymous FTP.] To: Distribution From: David K. Kahaner ONR Asia [kahaner@xroads.cc.u-tokyo.ac.jp] Re: Nippon Steel Kimitsu Works 18 March 1991 ABSTRACT. A visit to Nippon Steel's Kimitsu Works is described. INTRODUCTION (STEEL). In 1989 world steel production of about 780,000 thousand tons was divided as follows. USSR 160,000 thousand Japan 108,000 USA 88,000 China 61,000 W. Germany 41,000 Italy 25,000 Brazil 25,000 Korea 22,000 France 19,000 Other (Canada, 213,000 India, etc.) World steel production has been growing moderately. Growth among the top producers varies from a low of about 4% (Italy) to a high of 14% (Korea). US production jumped 12% between '87 and '88, but decreased slightly between '88 and '89. Japan consumes about 80% of its production, approximately half in the construction industry, 17% for automobiles, and 8% for industrial machinery. Although only a small amount of crude steel is imported to Japan, almost 100% of the iron ore and coal, the major raw materials used in steel making are imported, primarily from Australia, Brazil, and India. By comparison with other parts of Japanese industry, steel industry is not exceptionally healthy. Nevertheless a company like Nippon Steel is huge, with nearly half a million employees, almost 300 subsidiary corporations, and an annual budget greater than that of many countries. Japanese steel exports are down because of production from other industrializing countries such as Korea. But a robust economy is allowing total production to grow. There is increasing concern about a lack of workers, both because of a general labor shortage caused by peaking/declining population, and a resistance by young people to go into industries that are seen as dirty and dangerous. The industry recognizes that it must diversify into other businesses at the same time that it further automates steel making. For Nippon Steel, new fields are associated with building computers and software, new materials, and mobile communications. My own interest in Nippon's Kimitsu works was primarily to see how far some of this automation had gone, and to what extent computerization had been accomplished. By company, steel production in 1989 was as follows. Nippon Steel Japan 28,000 thousand Usinor Sacilor France 23,000 Pohang Korea 15,500 British Steel U.K. 14,200 USX U.S.A 12,900. NKK Japan 12,300 Thyssen W. Germany 11,900 ILVA Italy 11,400 Bethlehem Steel U.S.A. 11,000 Kawasaki Steel Japan 11,000 NIPPON STEEL KIMITSU PLANT The Kimitsu plant is due south of Tokyo (about 75 minutes by fast train), across Tokyo Bay in Chiba prefecture, and facing across the Bay toward the industrialized cities of Yokohama and Kawasaki. It occupies 10 million square meters of flat, partially reclaimed land. There are about 13,000 people at the facility, but less than half are Nippon Steel employees, the others contractors. In fact Nippon employment at the site has been decreasing since the mid '70s. Steel production at the site was mildly decreasing until 1988 at which time it took a large jump due to consolidation of other facilities. The fact that the company produces more steel at Kimitsu now than it did at its peak in the 1970s, but with about 15% fewer people suggests that their automation procedures have been working. Employee attrition has meant that hiring has not been a problem, and that the plant has ample applicants for the few hundred positions that it has each year. (Mandatory retirement, except for the most senior positions is at 60 years of age.) On the other hand we were also told that applicants are not as good as they once were, presumably because more Japanese students are going to college, and hence the average ability level is going down. There are almost no PhD hires. Nippon/Kimitsu, like many Japanese companies prefers to hire younger scientists and train them in the specific skills needed in their organization. Kimitsu is the largest of Nippon Steel's plants, producing almost ten million tons of steel each year. Nevertheless, the key to making it economically successful is to use enough automation so that much smaller customized orders can be economically produced. This was emphasized to me repeatedly during my visit. For example, each slab from the furnace can be associated with a different order and have individual specifications and destination. This philosophy is consistent with some of my earlier reports ["robots", 28 Feb 1991] about Japanese industry. No steel plant is really clean. This one was probably much better than most. There are many new buildings, but some were clearly part of the original plant, now 25 years old. A modern R&D center (1989) is within the plant site, and undertakes research closely related to the production line (this was not part of our visit). In addition, just outside the present plant, three large R&D labs that are currently in other parts of Japan will be brought together into a brand new Research and Engineering Center of about one million square meters with 1,200 scientists. Topics to be studied include AI, fuzzy logic, robotics, and virtual reality. The Kimitsu plant sends about 100 engineers and scientists overseas each year, and about 1,000 trainees per year from various countries are invited to Kimitsu. With respect to international cooperation, for example from the U.S., we were told that very few basic scientists are invited, and all of these are from industry. I'm no expert on any aspect of steel making. But our visit included Dr. Iqbal Ahmad (Army Research Office, Tokyo) a materials specialist who understands steel technology, and three representatives of the commercial section of the U.S. Embassy, who were able to explain many of the economic details. The Nippon Steel host was Mr. Mutsumi Ohji Deputy General Superintendent Kimitsu Works Nippon Steel Corp 1-Kimitsu, Kimitsu-city Chiba Pref 299-11 Japan Tel: +81 0439-52-4111, Fax: +81 0439-52-4494. Our visit was coordinated by Dr. R. Yamaguchi US and Foreign Commercial Service US Embassy 1-10-5 Akasaka Minato-ku, Tokyo 107 Japan Tel: +81 3 3224-5058, -5060. The basic steel making process is simple in principle and exquisitely complex in execution and detail. Iron ore, coal, and limestone are dumped in layers into a furnace (blast furnace) and melted. The molten "pig iron" goes to another furnace (basic oxygen furnace) where oxygen is injected in order to burn out and adjust the carbon content. Molten steel then goes to be cast (formed) into long rectangular slabs or long blooms (square cross section). Slabs eventually become flat products such as sheets, coils, pipes, or tubes, while blooms will become flanged beams, bars, and other sections. The trick is to do this quickly, efficiently, and safely, while at the same time maintaining consistency and quality in products with many different chemical and structural properties. The blast furnace (one of three) we saw at Kimitsu has an internal volume of over 5,000 cubic meters and runs continuously for about ten years after which it is shut down and repaired. (It is currently in the second year of its second cycle.) Molten pig iron is tapped eight times each day and then the hot metal is transferred to special rail cars for delivery to the oxygen furnace which is in another building. Today's newest plants move these two closer together, even into the same facility. At Kimitsu, once the molten metal gets to the oxygen furnace, the remainder of the casting operation is continuous, with the steel moving through one of the longest buildings that I have ever seen. Red hot slabs go in one end, and coils, sheets, and other things come out the other, all still so hot they can't be touched. The entire facility has remarkably few people in attendance and appears to be thoroughly automated. Slabs weighing up to 45 tons each can be processed. These can be formed into very long coils, or left as plates that can be individually formed to any length between 3 and 25 meters. KIMITSU--COMPUTING. My own interest in the blast furnace was associated with some AI techniques that are used to control it. After 25 years of steel making experience at Kimitsu, about 1,200 "If-then" rules have been developed (knowledge base) and integrated into an expert system, called ALIS, that monitors and adjusts various parameters associated with the furnace. The real time inputs to this are from 1,000 sensors. The system was written in-house, in C, and has a completely parallel maintenance system, so that new rules can be added or old ones modified by the operational staff. I think that this is fairly unusual in such a large system. Of course I was not shown any of the actual code which is proprietary, only some displays pictorially representing the blast furnace and its operation. In the control room I asked about fuzzy reasoning. The interesting aspect here was that the blast furnace supervisor was very well aware of what this was all about and we talked for a while about the use of fuzzy membership functions. He explained that these had not be implemented yet, but that the software department was studying the possibilities. There are essentially four main computer networks within the Kimitsu plant. The entire system has grown historically, but is now mostly integrated. (1) A business system associated with the head office and other plants. Attached to this are various process-control computers with their own local area networks. There is also a node associated with communication, allowing contact with and location of vehicles within the plant and even further through a Yokohama relay station., as well as a 50Ghz radio transmitter allowing satellite access. There are almost 2,000 business terminals at the plant connected to this net. There are about 60 process control systems (primarily Hitachi HIDIC-80Ms, Mitsubishi MELCOM350/50s, Fujitsu FACOM s-3500s, NEC, and a few IBM system/7s). These control everything from ordering of raw materials, through the various mills, transportation, environmental control, and medical clinic activities. (2) A phone and fax network (200Mbps) connecting about 2,500 units. (3) A video data network (32Mbps) for TV cameras. This also includes a CODEC (coder/decoder) allowing video conferencing. There are two video conferencing systems and two static video data transmissions systems. (4) An image data network (100Mbps) connecting two autochanging optical disk systems and eight display terminals. We were told that all of this hooked together by optical cable through a digital PBX. The Nippon Steel head office has 2 IBM 3090s, (400E and 600E), and 2 Hitachi M-680H. These are also connected into the Kimitsu system and available for use there. Ohji told us that the Kimitsu plant was the first of such a large size to have such an integrated computing system. Once the customer places an order with the head office, processing of the order, material planning, production scheduling, production control, process control, production, and delivery are integrated into one system. We only spent about half an hour in the control room of the continuous casting mill and it certainly seemed that the operators were completely aware of where all the orders were coming from and going to, as well as order plans for the future. Ohji also gave us several detailed diagrams of the overall system organization, networks, and the process control system in the Hot Strip Mill. I asked about software and was given the following statistics. Business related computing | Production control 13,000,000 lines Application SW =| (COBOL) | General administration 2,000,000 Control SW =| 1,000,000 Process related computing Application SW =| 5,000,000 (FORTRAN) Control SW =| 2,000,000 (Assembly, C) With respect to the application software, which is mostly in FORTRAN, I was told that this is written at the rate of about 1,000,000 lines per year, by about 140 people who average about 1,300 lines per month. This seemed pretty high to me and I asked about it. Apparently maintenance is still a significant problem here too. I guess that dusty decks are not only limited to the U.S. All together, the computer system department at Kimitsu has almost 300 employees. About 80 of these are computer-control activities. Because we never got to meet any of the software staff, there was no opportunity to discuss the kind of modelling or other computing techniques that they employ. While there were a great many terminals around, the color graphics terminals that I saw were mostly older IBM models and not very bright. There were a number of fairly good large screen projection systems, used mostly in control rooms for centralized displays. I also saw a few newer workstations in one of the control rooms, but was told that these were off line and being used to create an annual report. We did not get to visit the software section and so I do not know about the type of equipment they are using. During the summing up session, Ahmad asked about accelerated quenching, a process that is of direct interest to the Navy. We were not shown any examples of this during our visit, but were assured that the process is in use within the plant. NIPPON WORKSTATIONS. Our guide from Tokyo to Kimitsu was Mr. Kenji Osasa Senior Manager, Planning and Coordination Division Electronics & Information Systems Division Nippon Steel Corp 31-1 Shinkawa 2-chome Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104 Japan Tel: +81 3 5566-2163, Fax: +81 3 5566-2392. Osasa is in charge of planning information systems for Nippon Steel, and is not involved in steel making. We had several hours of interesting discussions about two of Nippon's computer activities. Osasa explained that Nippon is an OEM supplier of various Sun workstations. I wondered why there should be yet another nameplate for sale here, but he assured me that they were hoping to compete on price and also to develop a number of specialized Japanese software products. Some justification is described below. He also mentioned that they were marketing a "PC" in the U.S under the name Librex, currently as a 286, but soon as a 386 and 486. I really couldn't understand why they would want to inject another clone into this market. He agreed that it was very unlikely they would succeed, but given that the market was so huge such a high risk venture was worth trying. In Japan as in the U.S, workstations (engineering workstations--EWS) are a rapidly growing item. Even though they are still far less common here than in the West, sales figures are still impressive. Estimates for unit sales in Japan are as follows. 1990 104,000 1991 147,000 1992 190,000 1993 262,000 1994 332,000 1995 429,000 1996 471,000 Japan represents between 25% and 33% of the world EWS market. For comparison, IBM and Fujitsu, each have an installed base of around 5,000 mainframes in Japan. Of course, workstations are much less costly than mainframes, but the cost of buying/leasing software for them is not so different and represents a tremendous potential market. In 1990 Sun has about 30% of the EWS market, HP 15%, and IBM about 11%. These percentages seem to be growing, while Sony has about 25% of the market and its fraction seems to be shrinking. Between 1986 and 1990 packaged software, as opposed to customized software accounted for 30-40% of U.S. software sales; in Japan the corresponding figure is only about 7%. Thus it would seem that there is a good opportunity to sell Sun workstations with high profit proprietary software in Japan. -----------------END OF REPORT---------------------------------------