othing can beat a mixture of emotion, intelligence and method. This was the feeling of the more than 300 employees gathered at the 2nd Gerdau Quality Improvement Story (QIS) Meeting in São Paulo.

With a great deal of creativity and imagination, representatives from the units in Brazil, Canada, the United States and Uruguay presented the results of applying total quality methods and tools to solve problems using drama, movies, television news programs and musical parodies. These groups were chosen from the more than 1,000 QIS’s in the Company.

A judging committee chose the three most outstanding efforts. Gerdau Aços Especiais Piratini (state of Rio Grande do Sul) was awarded first place for its project focused on improving the continuous casting distributor usage rate by 21%.

Second place went to Gerdau Ameristeel Cambridge in Canada, which showed an improvement of over 600% in their billets between cobbles (number of bars produced for every bar lost) mark. Before implementing the QIS group, the unit recorded one lost bar for every 63 produced. After the QIS initiative, this figure dropped to only one bar lost for every 402 bars rolled.

Gerdau Cosigua (state of Rio de Janeiro) achieved third place for reducing its gauge and product exchange times by 79%. Production changes in the flat bar to T beam transformation, for example, has improved from three hours and 50 minutes to only 50 minutes.