Managing the interdependence among successive stages of production in steel industry

Only a small portion out of –200 steel-makers in the world can produce high-grade steel such as hot-dip galvanized steel sheets and directional electrical steel sheets. For equipment-related industry such as steel industry, technical knowledge is embodied in their equipment; thus, technology transfer and catch-up are somewhat easy. However, for high-grade steel production, steel-makers in emerging countries equipped with large-scale capital investment and state-of-the-art equipment capital investment continued to struggle. The reason for this is when a new process is added to the existing process and not just the added process, the operational parameters of all processes must be coordinated. Thus, when a number of processes increases, it leads to a massive number of combinations of operational parameters to be coordinated, thus requiring time to acquire knowledge patterns. a) Faculty of Business Administration, Kindai University, 3-4-1 Kowakae, Higashiosaka-shi, Osaka Prefecture, Japan 577-0818, byun@bus.kindai.ac.jp A version of this paper was presented at the ABAS Conference 2020 Summer (Byun, 2020). © 2020 Sungwoo Byun. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Annals of Business Administrative Science 19 (2020) 293–305 https://doi.org/10.7880/abas.0201111a Received: November 11, 2020; accepted: December 4, 2020 Published in advance on J-STAGE: December 11, 2020