Mauro Coruzzi, Senior Process Engineer at the Gerdau AmeriSteel plant in Charlotte, had read several books about Six Sigma, which uses statisical analysis to eliminate mistakes, and believed it could be used to improve yield in the rolling mill. He approached vice president and plant manger Tony Read and mill controller Gary Tomlin, both of whom encouraged Mauro to pursue it further. As Mauro put it, “Tony and Gary had a lot of faith in me, and that felt good.”
With his company’s encouragement, Coruzzi enrolled in the IES Six Sigma Black Belt course. He attended class for one full week a month for four months. The other three weeks of each month was spent in the mill working on his Six Sigma qualifying project, “Rolling Mill Yield on ½-inch Square Bars.”
Throughput was 24 tons per hour with yield of 92.6 percent before Coruzzi started his project. After his Six Sigma project, the throughput for that same product improved to 38 tons per hour with a yield of 96 percent.
“Applying the same concept to an additional 20 products, there is a projected improvement of about $500,000,” Coruzzi said. “If the program is applied to all 140 products, the savings could be as high as $1.5 million.”
Gerdau AmeriSteel is a global company with operations in North America, South America and Japan.
July 2005
