Steel, Aluminum & Metals Processing
On an extrusion press or a rolling line, an unplanned stop costs money from the first minute. High-speed and semi-continuous operations need accurate equipment data, maintenance planned around production, and a way to find the constraint before it limits the whole line.
What makes this environment demanding
Lines that run near capacity leave little slack for unplanned stops. When one machine fails, every operation downstream of it waits too.
Finding a window for preventive maintenance on a line that rarely stops is hard. With no clear PM record, the work gets pushed back a week at a time until the machine breaks down on its own schedule, at a much higher cost.
It's common for supervisors to believe the bottleneck is one place when OEE data shows it's somewhere else. A kaizen event or capital request aimed at the wrong machine doesn't raise output.
Temperatures, pressures and speeds have to stay within spec for consistent quality. Checked by hand once a shift, a billet temperature can drift for hours before anyone sees it.
See which machine is limiting output
10in6 takes its OEE figures from signals on your presses and lines. Every downtime event is logged with a reason code, and the equipment history it builds lets maintenance plan ahead of failures.
- Equipment-level OEE — availability, performance and quality rates measured at the equipment
- Downtime logging with reason codes — every event captured with duration, category, and shift
- Constraint and bottleneck analysis — identify which machine is limiting throughput
- PM scheduling and work orders — maintenance workflows built around your equipment list
- Maintenance inventory — parts stock with consumption tracking and low-stock alerts
- SPC for process variables — monitor critical parameters with control charts and automated alerts
OEE improved from 20% to 58% at an aluminum extrusion plant over 12 months after implementing 10in6.
Read the case study →"We install 10in6 on each new line, it helps us get them up to speed quicker. We can track all the downtime reasons and react to the biggest issues first."
Built for high-intensity manufacturing
OEE from the PLC
10in6 reads cycle and stop signals from your PLCs, so availability and performance come from the machine. Operators add the reason for each stop.
MES and CMMS in one system
Production performance and maintenance history live together. When a machine's OEE drops, the maintenance record is right there — no switching between systems to diagnose the cause.
Improvement aimed at the constraint
Constraint analysis ranks lost time by machine, so the next improvement project goes to the one holding output down.
Production and maintenance records for the same machines
Common questions from metals processors
- Can 10in6 track OEE on presses, mills, and continuous lines?
- Yes — 10in6 connects directly to press and line PLCs and calculates OEE from real machine signals, not manual estimates. An aluminum extrusion customer tripled OEE from 20% to 58% in their first 12 months by making downtime and performance losses visible by equipment, shift, and part number.
- How does 10in6 help reduce scrap and metal waste?
- Real-time SPC on process variables — temperature, pressure, dimensions, density — alerts operators the moment a process drifts toward its limits, before scrap is produced. Specific billets at risk can be flagged automatically from changing process trends. The same aluminum extrusion plant cut metal waste from 5% to 0% this way.
- Does 10in6 work with the older equipment common in metals plants?
- Yes. We routinely connect equipment that is 20 or more years old using Modbus, serial protocols, and custom hardware interfaces when standard options don't exist. Some of our most significant deployments have been in plants where the equipment had never shared data with any system.
- Can 10in6 manage preventive maintenance for critical equipment?
- Yes — the CMMS module handles PM checks on any interval, work orders triggered from floor events, parts inventory, and per-asset maintenance history. For metals processors, where every unplanned stoppage has a direct dollar cost, that history is what turns maintenance from reactive to planned.
The problems metals plants bring to us most
Finding capacity before buying more
Find the real constraint and recover its lost time before adding a shift or a machine.
Read the answer → DowntimeUnplanned downtime nobody can explain
Capture every stop from the machine, code it consistently and work the biggest reasons down.
Read the answer → MaintenanceSlow response when a machine stops
The four delays inside every response time, what to measure each week, and how to shorten each.
Read the answer → ScrapScrap that costs more than the count suggests
Rank scrap by what it costs, not how many parts, and work the top reasons down.
Read the answer →After go-live, your team runs it. Operators, downtime and scrap codes, products and targets, shift schedules, checks, alerts, emailed reports and real-time boards are yours to change. New machines, modules and custom reports go through a 10in6 project manager who already knows your plant. How the delivery model works →
See 10in6 applied to your metals operation
Tell us what your presses, furnaces or lines run on, old or new. We'll work out how to connect them and where your capacity is going.