rick@cs.arizona.edu (Rick Schlichting) (03/20/91)
[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---------------------------------------