"My first trip to a customer was to a moth-balled steel mill in West Virginia, determined to bring back production after a 10-year hiatus. A systems architect and I met with some of the mill owners, to talk about the DSA system at the end of the process line. Walking through the cavernous, dark, and dust-laden mill, large steel rollers stood like massive statues; a landmark to the titan of American industry. Passing statue after statue, we walked to the end of the line, to the misters and slack pits that lay calmly in the darkness, eerily frozen and dust laden. There—at the end of the line—was our contribution: a laser thickness gauging system. The system once saw thousands of miles of steel pass smoothly through its gaze, taking careful note of variation between rolls of steel down to the thousandth of an inch. Twenty years old, inside the finishing line control room, the PC booted up and the monitor displayed what seemed an ancient operating system." "We ran the application. Surprisingly fast, the program snapped to life, and the steady eye of the laser thickness measurement system rode smoothly on the noise floor of the sensor. It was at this point that I realized how sure I was of this company. The dusty grotto of a forgotten steel mill could easily have been the crypt of a lesser system, but our application survived. Feeling impressed and appreciative of the DSA engineers who designed the original system, I closed the application. Twenty years after its installation, we headed up to the steel mill offices to talk about an upgrade."
Data Science Automation
2020-02-28T11:55:46-05:00
"My first trip to a customer was to a moth-balled steel mill in West Virginia, determined to bring back production after a 10-year hiatus. A systems architect and I met with some of the mill owners, to talk about the DSA system at the end of the process line. Walking through the cavernous, dark, and dust-laden mill, large steel rollers stood like massive statues; a landmark to the titan of American industry. Passing statue after statue, we walked to the end of the line, to the misters and slack pits that lay calmly in the darkness, eerily frozen and dust laden. There—at the end of the line—was our contribution: a laser thickness gauging system. The system once saw thousands of miles of steel pass smoothly through its gaze, taking careful note of variation between rolls of steel down to the thousandth of an inch. Twenty years old, inside the finishing line control room, the PC booted up and the monitor displayed what seemed an ancient operating system." "We ran the application. Surprisingly fast, the program snapped to life, and the steady eye of the laser thickness measurement system rode smoothly on the noise floor of the sensor. It was at this point that I realized how sure I was of this company. The dusty grotto of a forgotten steel mill could easily have been the crypt of a lesser system, but our application survived. Feeling impressed and appreciative of the DSA engineers who designed the original system, I closed the application. Twenty years after its installation, we headed up to the steel mill offices to talk about an upgrade."