Production development for maintaining competitiveness in a tough international market
Henrik Stigers
Dalforsån
Dalforsån AB was founded in 1976, then as a subsidiary of British Steel. Today, it is a privately owned, all-Swedish company with 43 employees and with all production centred at Vikmanshyttan. We have a strong reputation in the steel industry and have a turnover of around SEK 53 million. We have customers all over the world – SSAB, Thyssen Krupp, Arcelor and Outokumpu Stainless being merely some of them.
Thirty years of experience
Dalforsån has 30 years of experience of weld-surfaced continuous casting rolls, and the company is an expert in this field. We have no design facilities and we specialize in producing only to customer drawings. We produce new continuous casting rolls, we refurbish old rolls, and we produce complete roll lines.
To make the entire continuous casting process as rational as possible, we do our best to develop weld-surfacing methods using known techniques. There are two methods for making weld-surfaced continuous casting rolls:
1. Submerged arc welding
2. Gas shielded welding
Dalforsån has decided to use the first method. It enables us to maintain uniformly high quality, while achieving high productivity. Since the weld is submerged, we eliminate fumes, gases and any open flames. This leads to a much more pleasant workplace, which in turn improves productivity.
Why does the customer choose us?
In our production, we have “gone against the flow” – we have built up the whole of our production capacity on our own and all of our production takes place in Vikmanshyttan.
So why do our customers, who include about 50 very large steel conglomerates around the world, choose us? At the present time, there are three main reasons: Our prices are competitive, our products are of high quality and, last but not least, we deliver what the customer wants.
But for our customers to continue relying on us in the future, it is important for us to have good, attractive prices, to maintain a sufficiently high quality of whatever we do, and to continue following the customer’s specifications, even if we can find new forms for this.
Our principal means of competition is the quantity per unit of time. We are good at buying steel and at producing, but we feel a certain threat from low-wage countries.
Development with value to the customer
So what are we doing to continue developing our operations, while also adding value for the customer?
We hatched a good idea for a one-layer weld that would cut the costs by 15 percent, but we had not succeeded in developing it. So the weld-surfacing costs for a traditional roll with two layers was 15 percent higher than it needed to be. We dared not take full responsibility for this idea, so we got in touch with Triple Steelix and were given the opportunity to present our idea to their control group. They quickly arranged a meeting with some interested parties, including Outokumpu Stainless in Avesta.
They made resources available at their materials laboratory to enable us to verify our test welds there. The laboratory test was concluded in April 2005 and the results looked very promising. We now dared to run field tests in two continuous welding machines in actual production. One of these is now in a continuous casting machine in Avesta, and the second specimen was delivered to a customer in Belgium. Final evaluation remains to be done, but the signs are that it is performing well.
This may lead to many good spin-off effects. If we can strengthen Dalforsån, we will also strengthen Outokumpu in Avesta, which in turn will lead us to ordering more steel from Hofors, for instance. And we will then strengthen our steel in the Bergslagen region! A one-layer weld is entirely in our niche.
It is a major challenge for us to convince our large international customers that Dalforsån is right for them. It feels right that we are of just the right size, so that I can have good personal relations with all employees in the company. We have good lead times and our future looks bright.