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Automation's Profile

Automation has always been an on going process in Tata Steel Limited since its inception. Till the late eighties, however, the approach had largely been unstructured. When automation was realised as a strategic choice for the company, the Automation Division was created in 1990.The objective was to help the steel company achieve its mission to become the supplier of World-class goods and services by facilitating its migration to a higher technology platform and by providing comparable automation at affordable cost.

Automation Division, Tata Steel Limited is the central agency for design, development, integration and implementation of Process Automation for the steel company and is also an international supplier of high level Automation for the metal industry. It is situated in the premises of steel company at Jamshedpur.

The automation division was established in Tata Steel Limited as a choice of gearing for the future in the fastest possible way, to counter the inertia of size and diversity of a big Steel plant in the era of knowledge based economy, just at the onset of it.The efforts of automation in the plant were going on in the organisation all along, to keep pace with varying technology. But with the changing face of economy in the early nineties these efforts were not enough. A structured approach to the automation of steel plant was felt and hence a group dedicated to process control was formed in the then Computer Services division.

This group grew into the Automation division in May,1990 of which information technology was a part.The subsequent change in organisation design led to bifurcation in the Automation division,with Information technology services and Automation services being regarded as separate entities. Thus the automation division with it’s competencies set into the solution of real plant problems in real time was set up on 1st January 1992 with a total of ten professionals.

During its period of existence, this division has executed a number of big and medium size projects in many areas resulting in saving of hundreds of crores of rupees for the steel plant. During this time, the team has grown from 10 to 110 professionals experts in various areas from laser, robotics, instrumentation to mathematical modeling and simulation.

Currently automation division is situated in the premises of the steel plant in it’s state of the art Automation Development Center and also in various plant sites developing and implementing process automation systems there.The professionals from various academic backgrounds and industrial experience enrich the team and it’s skills.

Expertise in conceiving and implementing total automation solutions involving, instrumentation, system integration, process modeling, communication and software development with approaches incorporating concepts of fuzzy logic, artificial neural network, etc

Multi-disciplinary group with about 110 bright, highly qualified and dedicated pool of engineers / scientists / professionals with wide industrial experience. Close association / interaction with premier Research and Academic Institutions like IITs, ERDC, MIT USA, etc. for collaborative research in various fields. A number of systems designed are backed by intensive research that has been tried successfully within the steel company.

Well-equipped Automation Development Centre with state-of-the-art automation systems, equipment and instruments. It also houses advanced laboratories to carry out research in the fields of Lasers, Communication, Instrumentation and Electronics.

Workforce well versed in developing software on various hardware and software platforms like VAX/VMS, Alpha and SUN computers Silicon Graphics machines and PC based platforms using operating systems such as UNIX, VMS, Windows NT, etc. Expertise available in developing Database systems using ORACLE RDBMS and also web based systems.