Hot mill manufacturers are required to accurately identify bars, billets, blooms, slabs and other hot products both for mill record-keeping purposes and for their customers. They are also required to mark these products with certain identification markings. These markings provide an “identity” for the product, thus enabling the manufacturer and the end-user to look up the manufacturing origin and history of the product in a database.

Technology is now available that enables bar code identification to be created “on-site and on demand” and to be automatically and permanently attached to these hot products by the use of special tags. These tags can be marked with text, graphic images and bar codes. The addition of this tag identification further enables the use of downstream bar code reading systems to automatically scan the bar code for automatic identification of the product at key manufacturing nodes, and also enables the ability to automatically update the database with manufacturing process results at these nodes.

For more information about barcode identification and traceability in the metals industry, view our technical white papers.