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COMPANY HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY
Sidercal Minerales, S.A. is a public limited company established in 1999, which emerged after the transformation of the company Sidercal, S.A. Sidercal Minerales, S.A. continues to carry out the work started by the latter company since its incorporation in 1990, coinciding with the end of a brief economic boom after the great reconversion of the steel industry. The company objective is to manufacture accessory products for steel metallurgy (primary and secondary metallurgy), as well as die-casting and other metallurgies.
From its inception, the company’s philosophy has adhered to a series of basic postulates which have made it possible for us to progress in our trajectory of industrial development.
These postulates are listed below:
1. Well aware of the approaching situation, with strong worldwide competition among producers and the early symptoms of a massive recession in the markets, all of which came to pass shortly thereafter, Sidercal has always been convinced that the final result of all of their actions should lead to an increase in productivity and a reduction of costs in business.
2. Innovation, in strategic terms, must be defined in the broadest sense. Therefore not only did it include new technologies, but also new methods and ways of doing things, which at times might have appeared to be rather unexceptional. So, innovation virtually was to encompass any activity on the value chain.
3. In a traditional industrial system, every transformation operation, regardless of the others, consumes raw materials, provides saleable products and storable residual products. This simplistic method should be replaced by a model better able to be integrated – an “industrial ecosystem”. This industrial ecosystem could function like a biological ecosystem. Naturally, it will never be possible to set up a perfect industrial ecosystem, but industrialists and consumers should change their habits, without degrading the environment, and try to optimize the use of the resources.
Within this general conceptual framework and with a philosophy of industrial action that is very close to the idea of industrial ecology, Sidercal Minerales developed a systematic project to explore all the materials that might be able to become a part of their normal range of activity, i.e. the field of metallurgy in its widest scope.
This optimum use of the resources should be based on two strategies:
- Durability: this reduces the flow rate of the resources.
- Intensive use: this is one of the strategies of dematerialization. In other words, to reduce the consumption of raw materials, which means that companies must apply strategies they have never used before in terms of guarantee, quality and their conception of what a “product” is.
At the heart of this philosophy of durability and the intensive use of the resources is the notion of conservation.
4. One of their greatest motivations was to work towards the goal of an authentic industrial ecology, i.e., to try and optimize the joint flow of material and energy. Working along these lines has led to innovative achievements and genuine competitiveness. Moreover, in the words of one of the first industrial ecologists, Jesse Ausubel: "In the same way that a scientific theory explaining a great number of phenomena, based on a restricted nucleus of hypotheses is conceived as the paragon of conceptual elegance, an industrial system that generates more wealth and welfare with fewer resources and less of an impact on the Biosphere will undoubtedly be even more elegant. Therefore, the aim of industrial ecology is a more elegant group of industrial processes".
5. Customers who compete with strategies that impose especially strict demands on the product or company service are the buyers who would serve as a kind of laboratory (and a source of pressure) to improve actions and expand the characteristics and services. Therefore it was important to identify and cultivate these buyers, who would become a valuable part of the company’s research and development program.
So, on the basis of these postulates Sidercal Minerales, S.A. fine tuned a fully computerized production system in order to standardize production and adapt to all the requirements of a quality system, in addition to a storage and bagging system that would adapt better and more efficiently to the demands of the market.
At the present time, with all of these projects underway, Sidercal Minerales is in a position, within the scope of steel metallurgy, to start manufacturing different quality steels and in different stages of the process, as well as other metallurgical processes.
In the coming years the challenges will be:
1. To continue expanding in order to maintain and strengthen our position in the market.
2. To keep on with a clear policy of differentiation that will allow us to broaden our competitive advantage: to think “differently” to be “different”.
3. To try and delve deeper into the “genetic” code of our company: gain an in-depth knowledge of our essential abilities in order to protect and defend them.
4. To broaden and strengthen our industrial policy: to think and work globally. Accumulate resources by borrowing them to have them on hand.
HUMAN RESOURCES
AND ORGANIZATION
The company is currently made up of a staff of 13 people distributed among the following departments:
- Managing director ............ 1.
- Quality ........................... 2.
- Production....................... 7.
- Sales............................. 1.
- Administration................ 2.
MEMBERSHIP IN ASSOCIATIONS AND ORGANIZATIONS
Sidercal Minerales, S.A. is a founding member of FUNDACION ITMA, which evolved from the transformation of the former Instituto Tecnológico de Materiales de Asturias en Fundación, an institution which has collaborated with our company on different R+D projects and which has played a key role in the development of our innovative policy.
The company is also a founding member of the Fundación para el Fomento en Asturias de la Investigación Científica Aplicada y la Tecnología (FICYT).
Sidercal Minerales, S.A. ©
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