Innovation is part of our DNA and a prerequisite for continued growth. Our development towards Industry 4.0 entails a permanent search for new employees. Each year we employ, on average, 150 new employees with the most diverse backgrounds and qualifications. In addition, we also have a structural collaboration with the world of academia and research in order to keep pushing the boundaries of steel production.
Our strength lies in our capacity to innovate and to keep pushing the boundaries of steel production. In this context, we are committed to ‘Industry 4.0’ or the fourth industrial revolution. Industry 4.0 will fundamentally change our production methods in the coming years. We have what it takes to be the frontrunner in terms of innovation: highly qualified employees, technologically advanced installations and strongly automated processes. In addition, we collaborate with various research centres inside ArcelorMittal and within the academic world to develop new types of steel and new coatings.
The colleagues of our Sidgal hot dip galvanising line and of the industrial automation and models department are committed to achieve the far-reaching digitisation of their quality control and production reporting. On 21 November 2018, it earned them the Trends ‘Digital Pioneers’ award. The award rewards companies who are successful in implementing digital transformation.
Our path towards Industry 4.0 also entails a permanent search for new employees. Each year we are looking for 150 new employees with the most diverse backgrounds and qualifications. In order to step up the search, we developed quite a few new and innovative initiatives.
Since February 2018, we have enabled applicants to make a virtual/augmented reality exploration of the wonderful world of steel on job fairs. Our colleagues in the IT department developed an application for the Microsoft HoloLens making it possible to virtually discover the options offered by steel as well as the applications of steel in a car.
To highlight our current vacancies, we launched a communication campaign via ‘De Lijn’, the Flemish public transport company, in May 2018. The campaign image focused on our innovative nature, as well as on Industry 4.0. The associated tagline was developed internally, based on a competition in which over 100 colleagues took part.
ArcelorMittal Belgium organised its second hackathon called ‘The Challenge’, a hackathon in the context of Industry 4.0.
At the end of September, ArcelorMittal Belgium successfully organised a second hackathon. The event took place in The Egg, Brussels, from Saturday morning 22 to Sunday noon 23 September, non-stop.
The work hackathon is a combination of ‘hack’, which stands for optimising a programme, and ‘marathon’. During a hackathon event, there is team collaboration around a specific subject or a problem and a short deadline by when the problem must be resolved. Just as the sports element it is named after, a hackathon demands a lot of energy during a hectic period. To complete the comparison, it also involves the necessary feeling of success when the event is over and the objective has been achieved.
As a high-tech and innovative company, we actively use the latest techniques for gathering, processing, visualising and analysing all kinds of (process) data. This data contributes to a safer and more efficient organisation.
During this year’s Challenge, the participants faced the task of raising the bar for Health and Safety at ArcelorMittal Belgium. Highly challenging and modern technologies such as chatbots, artificial intelligence and methods to process natural language and text (NLP) in a structured manner were at the heart of it. This is how we wanted to lay the foundation for the digital safety assistant of the future.
The winners were:
Each of the winning teams received a money prize and a 3D model of our Challenge logo (developed in-house). The event was aimed at students and enterprising young adults. Various workshops and training sessions were held throughout the hackathon weekend to immerse the participants in the world of Industry 4.0. A call was made on experts, including from Microsoft and the Universities of Mons, Leuven and Brussels.
ArcelorMittal Gent gives potential colleagues a flying start during very first job day.
On Saturday 13 October, we organised our first job day, based on the ‘On land, at sea and in the air’ theme. We started the day in the North Sea Port, from where we took a boat to our site. Afterwards, the participants were given the opportunity to explore behind the scenes of our site in Ghent. A short 1-on-1 with our colleagues of the HR department was on the agenda in the afternoon. The participants were also given the opportunity to visit our digitisation fair. We concluded the day with a helicopter flight over our site. A successful event with over 80 participants, some of which have already joined our ArcelorMittal team since.
ArcelorMittal Belgium relies on over 500 engineers working in production or maintenance, or dedicated to IT, automation, engineering or research and development, in a domestic or international environment. They, for example, develop mathematical models to improve the business processes, industrialise new products, improve the metallurgic quality of the steel products, refine the production process and co-ordinate maintenance and automation projects.
The collaboration will give a strong impulse to value creation through innovation and will guarantee the inflow of new insights and motivated knowledge employees.
In the autumn of 2016, we entered into a framework contract with the University of Ghent for a long-term collaboration. With the framework contract, we are committed to provide financial support to a number of research projects by different research groups per year. The topics for research are in the domain of energy and CO2 efficiency, material efficiency, productivity increase and automation.
Following the framework agreement with Ghent University, we entered into a corresponding agreement with Liège University at the end of 2018, with it we aspire to work on a diverse range of projects focused mainly on research and attracting new talents.
In Liege we work in close collaboration with the CRM group (Centre de Recherche Métallurgique). Together, we were able, among other things, to launch a revolutionary new installation in 2017: the Jet Vapour Deposition. The pioneering JVD technology coats steel inside a vacuum chamber by spraying zinc onto the steel sheet at high speed. The line, which was inaugurated in early 2017, was the result of eight years of hard work by ArcelorMittal and the CRM group.
Our ArcelorMittal site in Ghent has been in a collaboration with the OCAS research centre for several years. OCAS is a market-oriented research centre that offers metal-based solutions and result-oriented services to metal producing and metal processing companies around the world. It is a joint venture between ArcelorMittal and the Flemish Region.
