Grooper
Grooper
Automating Mill Test Report Processing
Automating mill test reporting is a daunting task because the reports contain a diverse set of a given raw material’s chemical and physical properties. They certify a material and are designed to prove quality assurance and compliance with industry standards like ANSI and ASME. Mill test report processing is performed by trained professionals and is a very time-consuming but necessary process.
What makes automating mill test report (MTR) processing difficult is the vast number of fields contained on the reports and that the layout of the fields is different for different manufacturers. Adding to the difficulty is that many of the reports have poor image quality because they’ve been printed, hand-signed, and scanned. Here’s a sample MTR for a steel plate from the Paul Mueller Company, a stainless steel manufacturer:
As you can see, there are a lot of fields of data!
The crucial thing to note is that once a raw product is shipped to a manufacturer, it is then their responsibility to track and maintain an awareness of the information on the mill test report. For example, in the steel industry this is done through a heat code, or heat number stamped or written on the metal itself.
MTRs Are Vital for Quality Assurance and Compliance
6 Steps to Automate Mil Test Report Processing
Some MTRs are emailed in PDF format as part of the shipment notification for ordered products. However, in many cases only physical copies are available, so they must obviously be scanned. The first step is taking the digital copy of the mill test report and using image processing software to remove all non-text elements. This means digitally removing all the lines and non-text objects. Humans need this kind document structure to gain an understanding of the data, but for software to “read” the MTR, these lines and objects only get in the way. And if the MTR has been faxed and drug around a dirty shop floor, and then scanned – it’s going to need some digital cleanup!