▲ In February last year, the POSCO Mutual Growth Support Group announced the start of its activities in 2022. Provided by POSCO
The PoSCO Win-Win Growth Support Group, launched in 2021, targeted a total of 46 SMEs for two years by identifying 198 tasks in four areas, ▲smart factory construction, ▲ESG problem solving, ▲facility/process, and ▲ technical innovation, and carrying out improvement activities.
By matching government projects such as the smart factory construction support project in a timely manner, part of the project cost was supported to reduce investment costs and improve profitability by solving equipment and process failures. In particular, better business performance was created through sales support activities. In addition, by discovering improvement tasks focused on ESG management, we have achieved results such as improving the working environment, removing safety hazards, realizing carbon neutrality, and improving productivity.
If we look at representative support cases of the Win-win Growth Support Group that resulted in a ‘win-win’ with customer suppliers, there is the case of Vesuvius Sensor & Probe. Vesuvius Sensor & Probe, located in Gokseong, Jeollanam-do, is a supplier that supplies POSCO with ‘probes’, a product that measures the composition and temperature of molten iron and molten steel. The Win-Win Growth Support Group visited Vesuvius Sensor & Probe in July last year and began a full-scale technical support consultation. First, in order to discover the root cause of the defect, we divided the defect phenomenon by type and created a real-time communication channel between the purchasing department, the consumer department, and the supplier. In addition, by collaborating with external quality experts, it was confirmed that the cause of product defects was in air permeability, and improvement samples were produced and tested to solve the defect problem.
Located in Daegu, Ryulim Industry is a company that receives wire rods from POSCO and sells them to customers after going through the wire drawing process. Ryulim Industrial had an ERP (enterprise resource planning), but no MES (production management system), so he had to do simple repetitive work of entering the general status of orders, inventory and progress control in Excel every day manually. In response, the Shared Growth Support Group introduced RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to automate repetitive manual tasks such as daily ordering and inventory, reducing work time by more than 80%.
Gyeongcheon Industrial is a company that produces road safety facilities, including guard rails, by processing Posco’s PosMAC steel plates It operates an old-fashioned PLC (automatic process control unit) that is more than 25 years old, so it has the production line itself must be stopped in the event of a failure. However, the PLC program cannot be backed up, spare parts have been discontinued, and there were no reference materials such as drawings and manuals for backing up. In response, the Win-Win Growth Support Group developed a new backup program by introducing ‘reverse engineering’, a method of reverse engineering the system. Before this, PLC operating manuals were created, such as systematizing facility operations and organizing input/output lists for sensors and operating desk buttons.
