Ugitech, Europe's leading producer of stainless steel long products, has launched the digital transformation of its Ugine plant in the French Alps, starting with energy performance. With gas and electricity accounting for a significant share of its production costs, they were the first focus of its OIAnalytics deployment, Optimistik's industrial data platform. What started with energy is now expanding to the overall performance of the site's production processes.
Based in Ugine, in the Savoie region of France, Ugitech is the largest private employer in the department. The Ugine plant is the company's main site; Ugitech is part of Swiss Steel Group.
Ugitech produces stainless steel products: bars, wire rod and drawn wire. It serves more than 3,000 active customers in energy, automotive, food processing, nuclear, healthcare and aerospace, always for critical applications. Smartphone touchscreen systems, fuel injectors in combustion-engine vehicles and the ventilators used during the Covid crisis are made from its steels.
Ugitech's processes are highly energy-intensive: every year, the site uses several hundred GWh of electricity and gas. For electricity, that is the equivalent of a city of several hundred thousand people; for gas, of several tens of thousands of homes. The company therefore set itself two goals:
That is where digital comes in. Until then, tracking relied largely on Excel spreadsheets, an approach that quickly reaches its limits at this scale.
“Doing things by hand in Excel files is not reliable, it is not robust. Doing the same things with intelligence makes us much more reliable, much more predictable and much more efficient.” (translated from French) — Frédéric Perret, Development Director, Ugitech
Ugitech launched its digital transformation to better measure and control its consumption and sharpen its analyses. With OIAnalytics, teams have built detailed monitoring of production and energy consumption by linking equipment metering data (gas and electricity) with production traceability data (work orders, genealogy). They now have far more advanced dashboards than in Excel to track energy consumption by product. Above all, they can analyze the data to identify the parameters with the greatest influence on energy consumption, and optimize them.
For a long time, the company refused to let its data leave the site to be hosted in the cloud. After significant work to put data governance and cybersecurity rules in place, it took the step. Optimistik brought its cloud expertise to support it through this transition.
Day to day, OIAnalytics is a real benefit for the teams in charge of energy. Today, production is also seeing its value: the project, initially focused on consumption, is evolving into a site-wide approach that includes the production teams' data needs.
“Day to day, yes, it's a real benefit, and on top of that we're realizing that production also has a lot to gain from it. Starting from consumption, we're now moving toward a truly site-wide approach, with production needs to track the data, and that opens up great prospects for the future.” (translated from French) — Jean-Paul Tissot, Energy Transition Manager, Ugitech
For Ugitech, data has become a competitive lever in its own right.
“It's leveraging this data that allows us to be reliable, to achieve a very high level of quality and, in a way, to have the capability to serve our markets properly.” (translated from French) — Frédéric Perret, Development Director
At Ugitech, OIAnalytics first made the site's energy consumption visible, analyzable and predictable. The approach is now extending to production, toward data-driven management of the entire Ugine site.
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