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Danieli Q3-Manufacturing MES to Cover Ezz Flat Steel From Meltshop to Skin-Pass

Jessica Nicole
Danieli Q3-Manufacturing MES to Cover Ezz Flat Steel From Meltshop to Skin-Pass

Danieli Automation said on September 18, 2026 that Ezz Steel selected it to supply a new extended Manufacturing Execution System for the Ezz Flat Steel plant in Ain Sokhna, Egypt. The system is Q3-Manufacturing, a web-based platform that puts production management, operational coordination, quality control, and advanced analytics in one place. Danieli Automation logged the project kick-off on May 28.

The scope is the whole plant, not one line: two meltshops, a Quality Strip Production (QSP) thin-slab caster and hot-strip mill, a billet caster, two bar and wire-rod mills, and a hot skin-pass mill. That is flat and long products under one MES. Ezz Steel runs four integrated steelmaking plants in Egypt with a combined capacity of about 7 million tons a year, according to Mesteel.

Entrance stairs and a Welcome to the Hot Strip Mill sign at a steel plant. Photo: Jason Knauer, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
A hot-strip mill is one stage of many; Ezz’s new MES has to follow the steel from meltshop through skin-pass. Photo: Jason Knauer, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Danieli lists the functions plainly: order dressing, operational planning and detailed scheduling, meltshop pacing, and real-time shop-floor coordination. Pacing is the job of keeping meltshop output in step with the casters and mills downstream. Putting it in the same system as the schedule means a late heat shows up as a schedule problem right away, not at the end of the shift.

The rest of the scope is about material and quality. Q3-Manufacturing will manage the yards for raw materials, billets, bundles, and coils, and it adds quality management with inline and predictive quality control, plus analytics and reporting. Danieli says the goal is better visibility, faster decisions, better use of resources, and stronger quality assurance across the plant.

Rolled steel coils loaded on rail wagons in the freight yard at Tornio, Finland. Photo: Methem (Mikko J. Putkonen), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Yard management only works if every coil’s location and quality record live in the same system as the order. Photo: Methem (Mikko J. Putkonen), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Other MES vendors are doing the same thing. On October 1, ifm electronic and Industrie Informatik announced a partnership that adds ifm sensors and machine connectivity to the cronetworld manufacturing platform, where cronetwork MES covers everything from APS to machine data collection and traceability. Both companies say their first joint customer projects are already live. On September 24, Sage listed Astrée Software’s Factory Pilot MES and scheduling tool as a Sage X3 Tech Partner, which connects that ERP to the production floor.

For N23D, the test is simple: the order, the detailed schedule, the pacing decision, the yard location, and the inline quality result all belong to one record that follows the material from melt to finished coil or bundle. That record should live in MES, QMS, and ERP inside one native Rust binary, not in separate systems synced at shift change.

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