In an ever more competitive global market, European Steel producers urgently need differentiation as distance or referencing are not a protection anymore.
From steel customers’ point of view, one main reason for the decision for a specific supplier is trust in the fact that the delivered product fulfills his individual requirements. Consequently only if the European Steel Industry succeeds to win customer-trust and solidifies client intimacy, it will achieve a durable competitive advantage and thus reduce pressure from world-wide imports.

Consequently, this project aims to establish a new level of customer-supplier collaboration by means of the horizontal integration of quality information over the complete supply chain comprising the full exploitation of all available quality information and knowledge from the measurement up to the final product at downstream industries (e.g. car manufacturer). In this project an adaptive Quality4.0 platform will be developed which allows online analytics of large data streams to realise decisions on product quality and provide tailored information of high reliability that can be individually exchanged with customers to put a common focus on the manufacturing of highest quality goods.

A bidirectional customer/supplier exchange of quality relevant information is foreseen, enabling lower production costs, increased yield and improved identification of quality problems in steel production processes.
In times of challenging global markets with very strong competition from outside Europe it is of strategic importance for the European steel industry to proactively promote such a common platform instead of reacting on specific customer demands.