Collaborating to Pioneer a New Era in Intelligent Manufacturing

As a leading steel enterprise in Shanxi Province, Jingang has consistently prioritized technological innovation and transformation. In response to intensifying market competition and evolving industry standards, Jingang recognizes that intelligent manufacturing is essential for strengthening core competitiveness and achieving sustainable development. CERI Digital Technology, a specialist in integrated intelligent manufacturing solutions for the metallurgical industry, has partnered with Jingang to deliver comprehensive digital and intelligent transformation strategies. Drawing on deep technical expertise, extensive project experience, and strong innovation capabilities, CERI Digital Technology has supported the creation of the Jingang Intelligent Manufacturing Project—a model for long-process full-industrial-chain transformation in the iron and steel industry. During the first phase, significant milestones were reached, including the launch of the MES in Jingang Park, activation of the control center, operation of the digital factory and data center, implementation of a smart environmental protection system, and deployment of a big-data analysis system. The second phase focused on enhancing the digital infrastructure of production lines across Jingang’s Western Area and other holding subsidiaries. Multiple systems—including the MES in Jingang Park and the Western Area, Hua’an Coking, and the new ERP system—were launched simultaneously, achieving a comprehensive upgrade of Jingang’s digital ecosystem. This enabled end-to-end collaboration in production planning, logistics, and quality management, and realized full digital coverage of the entire industrial chain.

Exterior View of the Jingang Intelligent Manufacturing Project

During the implementation of this project, CERI Digital Technology accurately identified industry technology trends and leveraged the industrial Internet platform to deeply integrate cutting-edge technologies—including the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, digital twins, big data, and artificial intelligence—into Jingang’s business management and production processes. By building a comprehensive digital ecosystem covering production management, warehousing and logistics, quality control, equipment management, and energy and environmental protection, the project achieved seamless integration of information flow, capital flow, and logistics. A robust real-time data acquisition and monitoring system was established on a big data platform, enabling the real-time capture of key process indicators and automatic linkage to relevant quality specifications. The system issues immediate alerts for any abnormalities, ensuring stable, high-quality production. Additionally, big data and AI technologies are employed to extract deep production insights, optimize operating conditions, and enhance control systems. This enables intelligent functions such as online quality analysis and control, intelligent equipment operation and maintenance, cost analysis, integrated production scheduling, and sales forecasting across the entire steel process. These capabilities support Jingang’s decision-making and intelligent production scheduling, ensuring efficient integration of operations and intelligent decision-making analysis management.

Digital Ecosystem of the Jingang Intelligent Manufacturing Project

To address the complexity of Jingang’s multi-line production processes—including the pre-ironmaking stockyard, coking, sintering, pelletizing, blast furnace, BOF steelmaking, and bar and wire rod rolling—CERI Digital Technology designed and implemented a systematic, full-chain technical framework for the project based on its independently developed next-generation intelligent manufacturing system. Utilizing the CERIOS·AICORE Platform, CERI Digital Technology established a robust digital foundation for Jingang, showcasing its strength in industry-leading innovation and application. Leveraging containerization and Kubernetes (K8S) technologies, the team built a cloud-native architecture that enables one-click release, containerized deployment, dynamic service discovery and governance, intelligent scaling, load balancing, and seamless, user-transparent upgrades. This significantly enhances system development, deployment, and ongoing maintenance efficiency. The technical team also developed a proprietary industrial IoT platform capable of parsing over one hundred industrial protocols. This platform enables comprehensive data acquisition across the entire ironmaking, steelmaking, and rolling processes. For key operations such as bar and wire rod, hot-rolling, and cold-rolling, data from over 100,000 points can be captured and stored within milliseconds, achieving a collection accuracy rate of 99.95%. This highly reliable data infrastructure ensures seamless integration of production, quality, and equipment data, supporting deep integration of information flow, capital flow, and logistics, and laying a solid foundation for advanced data analysis and intelligent decision-making.

Technical Framework of the Jingang Intelligent Manufacturing Project

CERI Digital Technology addressed the challenge of integrating heterogeneous systems across multiple production lines by developing standardized interface protocols and its proprietary middleware, MQCM, which supports multiple protocols, databases, and message-processing mechanisms. This enabled seamless connectivity between the MES and over 10 core systems, including ERP, SCM, CRM, WCS, and WMS. Using an innovative “master data middle platform + business microservice” architecture, the technical team rapidly completed the simultaneous launch of the MES in Jingang Park, the Western Area, and Hua’an Coking, and the new ERP system, setting a benchmark for parallel system implementation in the iron and steel industry. This efficient system integration ensures full-process collaboration in Jingang’s production planning, logistics, and quality control.

Jingang has achieved seamless integration of production and sales management through its intelligent manufacturing system. The system enables intelligent production scheduling based on customer orders, optimizes production plans, and ensures timely delivery. Throughout production, product quality is continuously monitored, allowing prompt traceability and corrective action for any issues, thereby enhancing the product qualification rate. In terms of intelligent blast furnace management, Jingang leverages a big-data platform for intelligent analysis and early warning of blast furnace conditions. Combined with a full-process intelligent burdening model, this approach ensures low-cost, high-efficiency furnace operation. By analyzing historical production data, the burdening scheme is optimized to reduce costs and improve blast furnace utilization, delivering significant economic benefits.

Forging a Smart Benchmark: Propelling Industry Transformation to New Heights

The project represents an innovative application of digital twin technology. By constructing a digital twin system with a 1:1 mapping to the physical plant, it achieves real-time visualization of production equipment status and process parameters. The high-precision modeling algorithm developed by the technical team at CERI Digital Technology synchronizes critical data—such as equipment vibration, temperature, and pressure—into a virtual space with millisecond-level latency. Engineers utilize the digital twin system to simulate and optimize core processes, including blast furnace ironmaking and BOF steelmaking, to forecast furnace condition trends in advance, thereby boosting the accuracy of production anomaly warnings by over 30%. By implementing plant-wide digital twins for critical equipment, the system enables a transformation from passive response to active management. It facilitates the rapid localization of key equipment across the plant—such as major metering instruments and belt scales—monitors on-site flow and weighing data in real time, and logs equipment replacement timestamps, inspection records, and maintenance status to issue timely replacement reminders. Real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance, and data-driven decision support not only improve equipment utilization and reduce O&M costs for Jingang, but also accelerate the digital transformation, ultimately building a smarter and more resilient production system.

Real-Time Production Task Dashboard for the Jingang Intelligent Manufacturing Project

Building on the success of the Phase I digital transformation and intelligent upgrading project, CERI Digital Technology continued to deepen its collaboration with Jingang to further advance and refine the construction of information systems for the Western Area production lines and other holding subsidiaries. The Phase II project went fully live on June 1, 2024, marking the synchronized switch-over and launch of multiple systems across diverse business units, including the Jingang Park MES, Western Area MES, Hua'an Coking, and the new ERP system. This upgrade to the digital ecosystem has enabled comprehensive synergy across production planning, logistics management, and quality management, achieving full digital coverage of the upstream and downstream industrial chains. This milestone achievement signifies a firm step forward for Jingang on the path of intelligent manufacturing. Upon completion, the project has increased production efficiency by 5%, reduced the product defect rate by 2%, and cut comprehensive energy consumption across the full process by 5%. It meets production needs and, in a highly efficient, high-quality, and refined manner, comprehensively supports requirements for production, control, analysis, and management. The project provides actionable, valuable reference information for intelligent manufacturing and has played a significant role in production scheduling and management for both ironmaking and steel rolling, as well as in cost and quality analysis. By enabling intelligent, guided production analytics and providing optimization recommendations, it effectively reduces the enterprise’s economic costs.

Digital Management and Control Platform for the Jingang Intelligent Manufacturing Project

On the strength of the project's outstanding performance in intelligent manufacturing, Jingang was awarded such titles as the "2022 National Intelligent Manufacturing Demonstration Factory" and "2024 National Excellent-Level Intelligent Factory." Additionally, it was recognized as a "Digital Intelligence for a Stronger Shanxi" Demonstration Project and selected as a Provincial Intelligent Manufacturing Benchmark Project. The construction achievements of Phase I and Phase II have garnered numerous national and provincial/ministerial-level honors. Notably, they received the First Prize for Excellent Engineering Computer Software in the National Metallurgical Industry from the China Metallurgical Construction Association in both 2023 and 2025, as well as the 2023 Second Prize for Beijing Excellent Engineering Survey and Design Achievements. The successful collaboration between the two parties has not only built a full-industrial-chain digital management system for Jingang, enhancing its core competitiveness, but also blazed a new trail of intelligent manufacturing for the high-quality development of steel enterprises, setting a model for the industry.

Leading with Green: Advancing a New Mission for Low-Carbon Development

As a key sector for carbon emissions, the green and low-carbon transformation of the iron and steel industry is imperative. Actively responding to national policy initiatives, Jingang has positioned green and low-carbon development as a core corporate strategy. By collaborating with the CERI Digital Technology to explore new paradigms for green development, Jingang aims to contribute its strength to the industry's green transformation.

Interior View of the Jingang Intelligent Manufacturing Project

In its pursuit of green and low-carbon development, Jingang prioritized energy management as the critical entry point. By leveraging the Smart Energy System developed by CERI Digital Technology, the Group has achieved refined management and optimized scheduling of energy resources. The system focuses on energy monitoring, analysis, and optimization management for the metallurgical industry. By leveraging digital technologies, it builds an integrated energy management framework for steel enterprises, delivering three core values — establishing a data-driven smart energy management mechanism and objective evaluation system, optimizing processes through hierarchical control to reduce management costs, and monitoring energy consumption in real time to identify anomalies and support energy-saving measures. In addition, the system achieves fully automated data collection, one-click balancing and settlement, and intelligent report generation. These capabilities ensure data accuracy and timeliness, drastically improving management efficiency and laying a solid foundation for refined management. In terms of technical innovation, the system integrates models for coal gas prediction, optimized scheduling, and power analysis. By leveraging Big Data and machine learning algorithms—combined with historical data, production schedules, and equipment status—it accurately forecasts energy supply and demand for the coming 24 to 72 hours. The system automatically generates multiple dispatching schemes to ensure energy supply for production while minimizing waste, ultimately boosting the utilization rate of Jingang’s self-generated power by 8% and significantly lowering energy costs. Beyond driving significant gains in management efficiency, the system empowers steel enterprises with a proven holistic energy control solution and a state-of-the-art, robust operations platform, effectively propelling the digital upgrade of energy management.

On the production front, Jingang is championing green process innovation to actively uphold the national strategy of Carbon Peaking and Carbon Neutrality. Through a partnership with CERI Digital Technology, the Group leverages Digital Twin technology to empower green, low-carbon manufacturing. Specifically in the ironmaking sector, this initiative has optimized iron ore utilization while curtailing coke consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. In parallel, by driving the industry's green transformation through innovation in hydrogen metallurgy, Jingang is establishing a new benchmark for low-carbon development. Anchored by the hydrogen-based shaft furnace smelting reduction technology co-developed with CERI, the Group has successfully substituted green hydrogen for traditional coke as the reducing agent. This breakthrough drastically slashes carbon emissions at the metallurgical source, yielding a significant drop in comprehensive energy consumption per ton of steel and effective CO₂ reduction. Ultimately, this initiative constructs a full-chain low-carbon ecosystem featuring "renewable hydrogen production, clean smelting, and green products."

Ultra-Low Emission Integrated Management, Control, and Abatement Platform for the Jingang Intelligent Manufacturing Project

Furthermore, CERI Digital Technology integrates Industrial Internet thinking into environmental governance, pioneering an innovative management paradigm of "Digital Twin plus Real-Scene Command." By fusing an advanced system of Monitoring & Tracing—Intelligent Decision-Making—Efficient Governance, the company has constructed a comprehensive intelligent system for Jingang that unifies sensing, governance, and control. By integrating data from 216 TSP monitors and 43 micro air stations across the 7-square-kilometer plant area, the system constructs a comprehensive Space-Air-Ground monitoring network. Powered by proprietary pollution tracing algorithms, it enables dynamic digital tracking of over 2,400 pollution sources, drastically enhancing the precision of event localization and accelerating response. Inside the Central Dispatch Hall, a 40-meter curved giant screen renders a real-time 3D visualization of the plant area. Upon detecting production emission breaches, the system instantly pinpoints the source to facilitate immediate mitigation, ensuring the enterprise continuously reaps the dividends of superior environmental performance. Standing at the vanguard of the era of Carbon Peaking and Carbon Neutrality, CERI will continue to leverage its leading expertise in fields such as environmental governance and energy management to empower more steel enterprises to fast-track their green development.

Jingang's endeavors and tangible results in green and low-carbon development have garnered widespread social recognition. The distinction of being named a National Green Factory stands as a resounding endorsement of its achievements in this arena. This accolade is not merely a source of pride for Jingang; it sets a benchmark for green development across the entire iron and steel industry.

Forging the Future: Co-creating a New Era of Excellence for the Iron and Steel Industry

Looking ahead, Jingang and CERI will continue to deepen their partnership. By fully leveraging their respective strengths, both parties are committed to making greater contributions to the high-quality development of the iron and steel industry. CERI Digital Technology remains committed to harnessing its deep-seated expertise in intelligent technology to continuously empower the evolution of Jingang's smart manufacturing. On the optimization front, the company will relentlessly refine existing systems to elevate their stability, reliability, and intelligence, providing a robust technical underpinning for Jingang's operations. In parallel, CERI Digital Technology will actively pioneer the adoption of emerging technologies and paradigms—including Large Models, Edge Computing, and deep-dive AI applications—to propel Jingang's smart manufacturing to a higher echelon. Furthermore, leveraging the proven success of these projects, the company aims to explore novel business models and market opportunities, contributing replicable and scalable blueprints to the industry's high-end, intelligent transformation. Jingang will anchor its future growth on smart manufacturing and green, low-carbon development, continuously elevating its own innovation prowess and managerial excellence.