Heat lot per aluminum sub-coil — losing the melt is not an administrative slip, it is product without a certificate.

The problem

The heat lot is not lost in the furnace — it is lost on the slitting line.

Keeping the heat lot per sub-coil on a mixed pallet is the cross-check of four data points living in four different systems:

1. The melt certificate — the chemical composition and mechanical properties of the heat lot, in the MES or in a PDF document from the smelter.
2. The master-coil → sub-coil link — which portions of the master coil go to which customer, managed on the slitting line by work order.
3. The label printed on the sub-coil — the actual code physically applied by the operator or by the line printer.
4. The pallet and the customer's delivery note — the SSCC and the EN 10204 certificate delivered with the shipment, with each customer's particular requirement (automotive, aerospace, distribution).

The quality manager knows it, but cannot inspect every sub-coil by hand. It gets entrusted to a scanner and a spreadsheet, and most of the time it works. The classic system works 99% of the time. That 1% is the claim — the automotive customer detects a composition outside its range and returns the entire batch as a precaution, because there is no way to prove which heat lot each specific sub-coil came from. The cost is not the replacement: it is the documentary claim reaching backwards, in a sector that lives on traceability.

How it fits the IRIS system

iLEAN Tracer does not replace your MES — it seals the cracks between melt, slitting, palletizing and certificate.

The lost heat lot problem is not a lack of information: it is information living on four islands that, at the critical moment (the sub-coil coming off the slitter), is not cross-checked in time. iLEAN Tracer acts as the filler sealing those gaps, without asking you to change your MES, your ERP, or the slitting line.

Edge sees every sub-coil as it leaves the slitter. Connect captures the melt certificate wherever it lives. Tracer keeps the master-coil → sub-coil → pallet → customer link. The agent reconciles and holds the shipment if it does not add up. The person signs — never the other way round.

The iLEAN pieces applied to the heat lot per sub-coil on an aluminum pallet:

• Tracer (functional layer over Edge + Agents) — keeps the master-coil → sub-coil → pallet → delivery note → customer link, without losing the heat lot at any slitting or palletizing step. Every sub-coil carries its number, its inherited heat lot and its geometric evidence (width, length, weight).
• Edge — terminal with machine vision (CNN) over the slitting and palletizing line. It reads the printed label of every sub-coil in milliseconds, verifies content and position, and triggers a stoplight or an ejector if the label does not match the sub-coil expected next in the MES queue. It works with no network. If the plant loses connectivity, Edge keeps reading with a local buffer — because what is critical cannot depend on connectivity.
• Connect — captures the melt certificate whether it comes from the integrated MES, from the PDF the smelter sends by email, or from the quality manager's spreadsheet. And it also captures what arrives from outside (a change in the automotive/aerospace customer requirement, a lab alert on a given melt) at second zero.
• Agent — cross-checks the slitting queue, the Edge visual reading, the real geometry of the sub-coil and each customer's certified requirement. If the sub-coil headed for the aerospace customer has a heat lot with a composition outside its tolerance, it does not wait for the shipment: it holds the pallet and alerts the quality manager. The person validates and signs the EN 10204 certificate.

See the full IRIS architecture →

Before and after

Traceability per master coil vs. per sub-coil with iLEAN Tracer

Aspect	MES + scanner + the manager's spreadsheet	With iLEAN Tracer + Edge + Agent
Heat lot granularity	Per master coil, lost when slitting	Per sub-coil, inherited and verified
In-line labelling	Operator prints and sticks, error possible	Edge verifies label vs. expected queue
EN 10204 certificate per sub-coil	Manual rewriting, delays	Generated automatically with real geometry
Customer claim	Return the whole batch as a precaution	Segregate the affected sub-coil, release the rest
Mixed multi-customer pallet	Certified requirements get mixed	Every sub-coil with its requirement verified
IATF/AS9100 audit	Rebuild by hand, weeks	Automatic dossier per SSCC with Edge photos

Impact estimate

Impact estimate for your plant — to be validated with your numbers.

The block below is an estimate to be validated with the specific data of your plant. We put it forward so the committee has an order of magnitude; we refine it during the diagnostic.

• Metalworking plant with lines slitting master coils into sub-coils, a customer mix of automotive, aerospace and distribution, EN 10204 3.1/3.2 certificate required.
• Tracer pilot on one slitting and palletizing line (Edge cameras + scale + geometric measurement + integration with MES and melt certificates). First value expected within a few weeks.
• Expected reduction of lost or mixed heat lot incidents: ≥ 30% over the baseline incident rate of your line.
• Indicative payback between 4 and 9 months, depending on the documented frequency of traceability claims and the average cost of return/rework per mixed melt.
• The hard lever is the avoided aerospace or automotive claim: full pallet return, documentary hold reaching backwards, customer penalty. One avoided claim pays for the pilot and the ones after it.

And the reasonable doubt of the metalworking quality manager

«What if the AI gets it wrong and lets out a sub-coil with a mixed heat lot?» — hallucination is a problem of free generation, not of anchored tasks. In tasks where the AI limits itself to recontextualising a data point from one system into another (reading the label and comparing it with the slitting queue), the best models brought the error below 1.5% ^[1]. And even so, what is critical is not decided alone: iLEAN Tracer holds the shipment and the person signs the EN 10204 certificate. The three safety rings are there precisely for this.

^[1] OpenAI paper «Why Language Models Hallucinate», 2025 — on the reliability of AI in anchored tasks.