In Metals and Advanced Manufacturing, we know what your hot buttons are.

You worry about what scrap is available where and for how much. What's the optimal blend for producing a great product at the lowest cost? How can you get your work done on time and on budget? And how can you keep employees, customers, and stockholders happy?

Our solutions offer terrific answers to all those questions and more. Whether you're in Operations, IT, or the C-Suite, our innovative approach to data-collection, analysis, and problem solving will have you poised for greater success – and fewer meltdowns.

Since 2003, we have been providing an easy way to benchmark and monitor your company's ferrous scrap purchasing performance.

Our Raw Material Data Aggregation Service™ (RMDAS™) gives you a real competitive advantage by providing a reliable source of accurate ferrous scrap prices and purchased volume information.

This innovative service provides you with realistic aggregated scrap market information as close to real-time as possible, in an easy-to-review format. That powerful data can be used to help you:

• Reduce your operating expenditures related to raw materials purchases
• Accurately benchmark buying performance
• Quickly sense trends -Recognize cost-favorable springboard sourcing opportunities from nearby regions
• Forecast with a unique historical perspective of realistic competitive data
• Gain an efficient, easy-to-use analytical reporting tool for internal data
• Evaluate previous commodity purchasing decisions
• Make more knowledge-based decisions for new purchases
• Enjoy a reduction of each of your locations' overall scrap cost per ton

You can also take advantage of our RMDAS Ferrous Scrap Price Index. Published each month, it provides you with the data you need to enter into more realistic, formula-based, long-term purchase agreements with scrap suppliers for the following commodities:

• Prompt Industrial Composite
• #2 Shredded
• #1 Heavy Melting Steel

Our Weekly Tracking Price provides participants with the ability to see the price evolution of the index commodities throughout each month.

With RMDAS, you can rest assured the information you're getting is comprehensive, accurate, and reliable. We have contracts with a significant number of EAF mini-mills and integrated steel producers, representing 60% of the total purchased scrap consumed in the U.S. each month. We collect, cleanse, analyze, verify, and store actual purchase order data for scrap materials for each participants' locations. We contract separately with every participant, and keep your data confidential. Only aggregated data is shared. Of course, you'll have quick and secure access to your own data on the Internet at any time, and can use our online analytical reporting system to easily analyze comparative regional aggregated data.

You face challenges on every level – operational, tactical and strategic.

Maybe you need to install a basic control system to improve consistency and quality across shifts on the factory floor. Maybe you want to integrate a thermo-chemical model into a process to improve yield. Maybe you need to provide production management with timely information to make better operational decisions. Or perhaps you're responsible for providing business and market intelligence to senior management.

Let our state-of-the-art technical capabilities help you look at your challenges from every angle, and problem-solve like never before. Encompassing real-time manufacturing processes through long-term supply-chain planning, we have models designed to help you with:

• Optimized raw material blending
• Refining/secondary steelmaking
• Chemical and mass-balance
• Heat and fluid flow
• Optimized production planning and scheduling

They're the kind of thorough, systematic solutions you'd expect from our multi-disciplined technical staff, business analysts, and project managers.

Take advantage of our consulting services, as well, including:

• Automation Feasibility Studies/Plans
• Model Process Tuning -Functional Specifications – Requests for Proposals
• Project Management Services -Forecasting and Predictive Modeling
• Networking
• IT Support

Manage and move your inventory in ways that make your process smoother and your workers happier.

Rely on our Scrap Yard Management Systems to:

• Display loading instructions for operators
• Track scrap boxes through the facility
• Maintain and update inventory amounts
• Integrate with your existing ERP, purchasing, and melt shop systems

These applications offer tremendous benefits, including:

• Increased consistency in loaded materials
• Improved inventory control
• Reduced bucket loading times
• Material and vendor tracking capability
• Matching theoretical and actual material charge weights

MSA's GAUGE Benchmarking Service

MSA has developed a powerful benchmarking platform that can be used by individual companies to GAUGE™ (Gather, Analyze, Utilize, Group for Evaluation) important operational and business metrics, within facilities and across business units, divisions and even the entire enterprise. The platform has been developed to allow clients to define the key performance indicators (KPIs) to be tracked, to group and aggregate data by various criteria (e.g., plant, division, enterprise), and to display information as graphs, charts, tables and standard reports.

How the GAUGE Benchmarking System Works

MSA works with the client to establish the KPIs to be benchmarked and defines important attributes for each parameter (e.g., unit of measure, precision, etc.). The GAUGE platform allows data to be easily uploaded from Excel® spreadsheets. Data is validated during the import process ensuring integrity of the information in the system. There are many built-in ways for the system to dynamically generate charts, graphs, and reports on all parameters. All of these outputs are exportable to a variety of standard formats and applications (i.e., Excel®, Word®, PowerPoint®, PDF). Administrative tools are provided to establish user-defined groupings of facilities and key parameters, to configure dashboards, and to manage saved queries and other useful features.

MSA's GAUGE platform can be provided as a licensed software platform or as a cloud-based 'software as a service' (SaaS) version. The licensed software version is installed on a clients' server located within their own internal network. The hosted version of GAUGE is located at one of MSA's certified disaster recovery/business continuity data centers and is accessed securely over the Internet. Secure socket layer (SSL) communication, robust password protected user accounts, and other system-wide security techniques ensure the integrity, availability and protection of clients' data.

You have systems in place. But maybe you need upgrades, innovations or additions.

One thing's for sure, technology is constantly changing, and to remain competitive, you need to change with it.

In Metals & Advanced Manufacturing, we offer flexible approaches to help you develop the systems you need. We can provide a complete technology refresh, a hardware/platform upgrade, or a hybrid approach retaining some aspects of your current system while porting other functions.

Not sure what's best for you? We'll perform a thorough analysis of your situation, considering risk factors and tolerance, internal technology expertise and preferences, support capabilities and more.

Whether we develop a new system, re-engineer a legacy system, or provide a component for a larger system, we follow an articulated methodology to ensure success. And that's the kind of system that makes everyone happier.