With more than 800 employees at Outokumpu in Avesta, the company tirelessly works day in, day out, to produce high performance stainless steel in coils or sheets based on recycled scrap from Europe. During the production process, strap removal from stainless steel coils was causing a safety hazard when the straps were removed manually. Consequently, there were risks of injuries or pinching. For this reason, Outokumpu decided to invest in de-strappers and strap winders, invented and made by Tebulo Industrial Robotics in 2017. And it paid off. Since then, the number of safety incidents has clearly reduced. The article below was contributed by Henriëtte van Norel.
The steel producer Outokumpu has a very long history in producing consistent, high-quality stainless steel. As inventors, and nowadays global leader, of this material it has 53 locations around the world, where it produced 2.2m tonnes of stainless steel with over 10,000 employees in 2019. A very well-known site of Outokumpu, with centuries of experience in steel making and long traditions (for example, duplex was invented here), is Avesta in Sweden. Outokumpu’s production range on this site covers a wide array of corrosion-resistant stainless steels for highly corrosive environments and stainless steel products for specific applications or demanding end use applications.
