Corus Furnace Reline – Project & Business Risk Management

Risk Management is the process of identifying, analysing and mitigating risk. This has often been conducted in a fairly haphazard way; however a more forward-looking approach was taken by the steel giant Corus when they conducted a large-scale intermediate repair to the largest blast furnace in Europe. The programme of work was high profile as during the outage all steel making and casting operations fed by the Redcar Blast Furnace ceased.

Corus enlisted the help of HVR Consulting Services Ltd to conduct a series of project and business risk assessments. The project risk assessments aimed to ensure all risks to the project were identified, analysed and managed, with a secondary purpose of promoting a risk aware culture within the project team. Quantitative schedule and cost analyses were conducted to analyse the outage timeframe and capital cost.

The business risk assessments were conducted on the entire Commercial and Industrial (C&I) section of Corus, to assess the impact of the blast furnace outage on the company. These business risk assessments again identified key risks to the Corus business, encompassing commercial, financial, technical and logistical risks. A process model was designed to model and forecast production throughput incorporating the effect of the identified risks. This allowed commercial and production decisions to be made and tested.

The project was, within Corus, heralded as a major success. The furnace reline was completed within the extremely aggressive window targeted, and the steel slab stockpile created to feed the mills throughout the outage was sufficient to continue operations.

A subsequent ‘wash-up’ meeting of the Steering Committee identified the project risk management and timescale risk analyses as one of the key reasons behind the success of the outage project. Furthermore, the business risk assessment, and in particular the process model, was seen as one of the critical success factors. In this way the project and business risk management work conducted by HVR Consulting Services Ltd enabled Corus to make significant savings on both the capital outlay of the project and the effects on revenue stream.