A regional structural steel fabricator in the US Northeast. Mill test reports landed in a shared mailbox, bar-tag photos landed in a shared drive, and the link between them lived in a folder name. AISC inspection prep ran two weeks per audit because the team rebuilt the chain by hand. We built a pipeline that parses the MTR, reads the heat number off the bar tag, and threads both into the QMS receiving record.
| Heat # | Spec | Mill | Chem | Mech | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| H-228491 | A572 Gr 50 | Nucor Berkeley | 12/12 | pass | released |
| H-228492 | A992 | Nucor Yamato | 12/12 | pass | released |
| H-228493 | A36 | Gerdau Cartersville | 10/10 | pass | released |
| H-228494 | A500 Gr B | Atlas Tube | 11/11 | pass | awaiting MTR |
| H-228495 | A572 Gr 50 | SDI Columbia City | 12/12 | pass | released |
| H-228496 | A709 Gr 50 | ArcelorMittal | 13/13 | 14 ft-lb |
| QA disposition |
| H-228497 | A992 | Nucor Yamato | 12/12 | pass | released |
| H-228498 | A500 Gr C | Bull Moose Tube | 11/11 | pass | awaiting MTR |
| H-228499 | A36 | Gerdau Petersburg | 10/10 | pass | released |
At a glance
One QA group, one QMS, fourteen mills feeding the yard. The join key was always the heat number. The work was getting it off the bar tag and onto the receiving record without a person retyping it.
The engagement
The stack
ISO 27001 · ISO 9001 · DPA and NDA signed at kickoff.
Before, the receiving desk
The QA admin owned the chain. Every MTR was a manual match against the dock receiving log, and the tie back to the bar-tag photo was a folder name on the shared drive. That worked until AISC asked.
MTRs landed in a shared QA mailbox, one PDF per heat. The QA admin opened each MTR, copied the heat number, looked it up in the dock receiving log, attached the PDF to the receiving record in Epicor, and stamped the heat traceability tag. The bar-tag photo for that bundle sat in a separate folder on the shared drive named after the PO. Three places had to agree before the chain held. AISC inspection prep ran 2 weeks per audit because the team rebuilt the chain from the mailbox, the drive, and the receiving log every time.
Pre-build baseline: 2 weeks of QA time per AISC inspection prep cycle.
What we built
The pipeline accepts the MTR by mailbox and the bar-tag photo by phone upload through the existing dock-scanner app. Heat number is parsed off both, matched, and written to the Epicor receiving record. Below 0.90 match confidence the case holds for QA review.
QA mailbox polled on a 5-minute cadence for MTR PDFs. The yard's existing dock-scanner app pushes bar-tag photos on capture. Both routes assigned an Epicor-ready ID on ingest, with a timestamp.
Document type tagged at ingest. PDFs routed to the MTR parse path. Photos routed to the bar-tag OCR path. Mill template recognised on the PDF route so the heat-number field is read from the right spot per mill.
Heat number, steel grade, mill code, and certificate date pulled from the MTR. Heat number read off the bar-tag photo by computer-vision OCR. Both sides normalised to the same format before the match step.
MTR heat matched against open dock-tag captures for the same heat. Match confidence scored on string similarity, mill code, and grade. Below 0.90 holds the pair for QA review with the specific reason in plain English.
MTR PDF and bar-tag photo attached to the matching receiving record in Epicor. Heat traceability tag stamped automatically. The chain (mill, heat, bundle, receiving line) is one query in the QMS.
After, the numbers QA signs off
Same fourteen mills, same dock crew, same Epicor instance. The pipeline matches every heat by number, attaches both the MTR and the bar-tag photo to the receiving record, and stamps the heat traceability tag at post. The chain lives where the auditor looks.
The QA admin still owns the held queue. She still signs off the matches the scorer cannot decide. The difference is that AISC prep is a query against Epicor, not two weeks of folder archaeology, and the heat number is on the receiving record the moment the bar tag is photographed.
Handover was light: the mill-template library and the held queue runbook sit in the client's repo, and the QA team owns both.
From the QA floor
AISC asked for our chain of custody. We pulled it up by heat number, in front of them.
QA directorRegional structural steel fabricator, US Northeast
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