Requirements checklist
What to ask for when choosing software for steel mills.
A checklist built from how steel mills work, to print or save as a PDF and bring to any supplier meeting.
What the software should cover
Tick each one that matters to your business.
- Enquiries, quotations and orders
- Raw material purchase and weighbridge
- Heat and production planning
- Heat, coil and lot traceability
- Quality tests and certificates
- Yard stock and dispatch
- Invoicing and receivables
Roles that need their own access
Who logs in, and what each person may see or change.
- For owners and plant heads
- For sales and credit teams
- For melt shop and rolling mill supervisors
- For quality and laboratory staff
- For stores and dispatch teams
Reports to ask for
Ask to see each one with your own sample data.
- Orders open, late and part supplied
- Heats by grade with charge weight, output and yield
- Test results and rejections by heat
- Raw material received, accepted and rejected by supplier
- Yard stock by bay, grade and size
- Dispatches by customer and truck
- Receivables by customer, oldest first
Systems it may need to connect to
Note which ones you already run.
- SMS
- WhatsApp or other messaging
- Weighbridge file import
- Accounting software export
- Payment gateway
Questions for any vendor
Put these to every supplier you are comparing.
- Does it cover both melting and rolling?
- Can a bundle be traced back to its heat?
- Can certificates be printed in different customer formats?
- Can the weighbridge feed weights in automatically?
- Can it hold dispatch when a customer is over limit?
- Is there a link to furnace or mill automation?
- Can existing stock and open orders be moved in?
- Can several plants share one system?
- Who owns the data?
- What does it cost?
Where the work usually breaks today
Circle the ones you recognise. They set the order of the project.
- Heat numbers are lost between stages
- Certificates are typed by hand
- Yield and scrap loss stay hidden
- Yard stock is a rough estimate
- Dispatch and billing run separately
Prefer to talk it through? See the steel mills page.