Total Savings: $70 million / year
Description of Problem
A steel rolling mill was considering changing suppliers for rolling mill lubricant. Mill lubricants are critical to a variety of product characteristics, but to assess multiple vendors required fully replacing the lubricant on the mill and running trial production through the mill and the remaining processing steps so the sample size was limited. There were two different types of annealing furnaces in use, and the lubricant might very well have responded differently to the two types. For each furnace type, there were two furnace practices tested. Additionally, one of the vendors changed their formulation in the middle of the study to try to improve their ratings.