Marina Chiesa, Safety Director in Ternium Mexico, participated in the Safety and Health in Work State Week on May 23th of 2022 in Nuevo Leon, where she presented technological tools that the company uses to give safe spaces in work.
Tools like video analytics, drones, radio frequency identification, autonomous cranes, and virtual reality, are some of the tools implemented by Ternium in their operations to increase the safety level on those areas.
For example, Chiesa highlighted the use of drones for making inspections in the heights and closed spaces, with the purpose of decreasing the exposition of people to those kind of places.
“In this way, we make sure to inspect our facilities to prevent any structural failure that could cause a collapse,” she said in the event organized by Nuevo Leon government in Cintermex.
Another technology are the cameras with video analytics in the different Ternium plants, which, with images and algorithms, identify unsafe procedures or situations that can end in a safety event.
Marina Chiesa highlighted all the technology innovations that Ternium implemented in safety matters.
“Its enormous potential is due the cameras that have record of what we could not see, which help us to identify behaviors that didn’t generate an event, but they could have; this gives us the opportunity to think about what could have happened,” she commented.
In the transport of steel rolls in the storages, Ternium uses two types of technology: RFID and Warehouse Management System.
In the case of RFID, the forklifts use this technology across sensors that read special labels on the rolls. Across this reading, it is possible to identify which roll is transported in real time in the storage.
Meanwhile, the WMS divides the storage in coordinates to identify the positions in which materials can be moved.
These two technologies are complemented with others for the autonomous operation of slab and rolls cranes from the Hot Mill 4 in Ternium Industrial Center in Pesqueria.
“An automatic system detects the arrival of railway cars. The cranes use a volumetric reader to determine the position of each material, that way they can move everything in a precise way. Finally, the crane realizes the movements in an automatic way, supervised by the personnel, who are in a remote pulpit, across cameras. The intelligent WMS determines the optimal sequence and the material position inside the storage based on its characteristics.”
The forklifts count with technology that facilitates the activities in the storages.
“With the innovation in technology, the company seeks to go further. Nothing is more important than the health and safety for all Ternium collaborators,” Chiesa mentioned to more than 400 assistants.
She highlighted the importance in 3D animations that the company makes about certain safety events that happen in Ternium, whose only objective is to make the collaborators to think about the importance of following all procedures for their health and safety.
“We reproduce the event with realism and 3D technology to see what happened and which errors were made. We want to make them think about it, so they can know how to prevent incidents and accidents”, she mentioned.