Stainless steel flat products producer Columbus Stainless has implemented a new information technology software system, which has enabled it to develop a new operations planning system to improve the facilitation of the planning and execution of its manufacturing processes at its facilities in South Africa and Malaysia.

The Corticon Business Rules software, developed by software provider Progress Software Corporation, is distributed by Johannesburg-based AIGS and will be implemented along with the new operations planning system at the producer’s Middelburg facility, next year.

AIGS solutions consultant Nick Cadenhead says there are two components to the Corticon solution – the Corticon Business Rules Modeller and the Corticon Business Rules Server.

The Business Rules Modeller is a standalone desktop environment for modelling, analysing, testing and saving business rules as executable decision services.

The Corticon Business Rules Server is a server-based, no-code business rules engine running in a Java container. It processes the rules that have been modelled, verified and tested in the Corticon Studio, ensuring reliable results and delivering fast performance.

“In 2008, Columbus Stainless decided to replace and re-engineer our existing production planning system as an in-house development. It was subsequently also decided to implement the new system at our stainless steel manufacturing facility in Johor Bahru, Malaysia.

“The Corticon solution, as well as the first phase of the new operations planning system, was implemented at Bahru Stainless in July 2011,” says Columbus Stainless business systems manager and technical project manager Tienie de Klerk.

Since its implementation, the system has been enhanced with several new releases as the facility expands. Implementation of the system is ongoing.

“The implementation at Columbus is an evolving one. Business rules are constantly changing, based on market conditions and customer requirements. “Hence, the rules in our processes are constantly changing, so Corticon enables us to continuously, easily and effectively, adapt our systems and processes to automate decisions to meet our requirements,” says Cadenhead.

The operations planning system manages the complex optimisation and scheduling of the stainless steel manufacturing process, which involves a range of control variables, including differing chemical compositions, mechanical properties, physical properties and surface finishes.

De Klerk notes that Corticon is easy to install and operate.

He says the biggest advantage of Corticon, compared with similar systems, is that business rules are expressed in nontechnical terms.

Separating the business logic from the application code and putting it in the hands of the industrial engineers who understand the policies, processes and underlying business logic that has to be implemented, also accelerates the entire development process.

In turn, this enables the development team to focus on their expertise without having to master the entire business platformor build algorithms around all its complexities by looking up tables to get an answer, De Klerk says.

“The separation between the application code and the business rules and logic allowed for a parallel development cycle where the industrial engineers could develop and test the business rules, while the main business application was still under development. This significantly reduced the development time,” he states.

Changes in rules are captured with comprehensive testing by the Corticon tools, compared with manual processes, and any undesired consequences are easy to identify with the visual representation of test results.

“We have witnessed the power of Corticon during the implementation of the business system at the production facility in Malaysia, where the production requirements were different from the original intent and the system could be adapted to cater for these requirements in a very short time, with little changes to the application code,” states De Klerk.

Despite the time zone and language differences between Malaysia and South Africa, it was possible to support the system, as Corticon rules are imple- mented on business-friendly terms.