BMM Ispat Ltd. is a Rs20 billion company, part of the renowned BMM Group. Its plant at Danapur, Hospet (Karnataka) is a true blue steel plant manufacturing high-quality steel products.

As part of a new Brownfield project, the company is planning to expand the existing capacity, for which ElectroMech is supplying 13 cranes in the first phase. This facility is being constructed to expand the product range and to include a semi-automatic process, which will increase production.

BMM Ispat approached ElectroMech during the summer of 2012 and after a thorough evaluation of ElectroMech's proposal, placed an order for 13 cranes to be used at various stages of their manufacturing process. Through a detailed understanding of its workflow and several interactions between both the teams, cranes of most efficient design, effectively matching the application requirements were selected.

The processes and challenges
BMM Ispat's plant is spread over a vast area of 50 acres (approximately 200,000 sq m) and the entire manufacturing process is divided into four stages. The Company was looking for a competent partner who could understand the challenges and design a complete material handling system to integrate the various processes. The objective was to ensure safe, quick and precise handling and appropriate manoeuvring during loading at the despatch bay.

Steel melting shop: The first area is called the steel melting shop, which handles all the operations from the melting of raw material to forming of billets of desired shape and size. Here the metal is processed in the molten form and handled by ladles. The formed billets are to be rotated in 90 degrees and are to be transferred on the idle rollers to take them to two different storage locations.

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