A Victorian steel processor operates high-throughput lines — slitting, shear and packing. Mobile Automation provides ongoing, embedded electrical, controls and mechanical support that keeps those lines running reliably and safely, and continually improves how operators interact with them.
The challenge
Steel processing lines run hard, and downtime is costly. The plant needed clearer operator controls, faster resolution of intermittent faults, better machine safety, and reliable ongoing support from a team that understands the equipment.
Our approach
Rather than one-off call-outs, Mobile Automation works as an embedded partner across the plant — improving the machines while keeping them running, and drawing on electrical, controls and mechanical skills as each job requires.
Scope of works
- HMI improvements across the shear and slitting lines: clearer on-screen text and new soft buttons for EMG auto/manual mode, photocell forward/backward control and leveller bridle raise/lower; added side-guide and pallet-feeder controls
- Machine vision: installed cameras at the separator bars and scrap baller with data cabling into the existing NVR
- Safety: realigned light curtains and diagnosed intermittent light-curtain dropouts to a faulty terminal bridge in the MCC providing intermittent contact — replaced and verified across multiple runs; added a key-locked mandrel-expand override
- Mechanical and electrical maintenance: repaired the slitting-head turret cable chain where cables and hydraulic hoses were crossing and chafing, corrected strip-monitoring EMG offsets, adjusted proximity sensors, and improved stacking-conveyor automatic logic
- High-bay lighting fault-finding and replacement at 11.5 m roof height
The results
- Clearer, more usable operator control across the processing lines
- Intermittent safety-system faults diagnosed at root cause and eliminated
- Improved machine safety and reliability across slitting, shear and packing
- A trusted embedded support partner that knows the plant