Case studies

MLJ Systems has worked with Tata Steel UK for years, building and supporting plant monitoring, utilisation and reliability systems that run every shift inside one of the UK's largest industrial sites.

We built the optimisation behind the charge balance model, using the Gurobi solver to optimise raw material charging across the operation. Formulating the plant's real constraints — materials, chemistry, availability — and solving them fast enough to be useful is exactly the kind of problem we like: one where a better answer is worth millions.

Our reliability work pays for itself too: one plant reliability project alone saves over £100,000 a year through failure reduction.

That track record led to the next chapter: we won the tender to modernise key plant systems for the Electric Arc Furnace transition at Port Talbot — one of the UK's most significant industrial decarbonisation projects — including the data and KPI foundations for the new furnace operation.

£3m a year saved through charge balance optimisation; £100k+ a year through failure reduction.

Protium is one of the UK's green hydrogen pioneers. Producing hydrogen at commercial scale needs operational software as dependable as the plant itself — and that software didn't exist off the shelf.

We built their hydrogen production management platform in Blazor on Azure: a modern cloud application that gives operations teams live visibility and control of production.

It's the same engineering standard we bring to steelmaking, applied to an emerging clean-energy industry — software people rely on to run physical operations, built to stay in production for years.

A modern cloud platform for an emerging clean-energy industry.

Some of the most important systems in industry were written decades ago, on platforms most of today's engineers have never seen. They keep running because they encode hard-won business logic — and because replacing them safely is genuinely difficult.

We migrated highly bespoke, decades-old OpenVMS systems onto a modern, supportable enterprise platform: preserving the behaviour the business depends on while unlocking modern tooling, security and integration.

Work like this is done incrementally and carefully — understanding the old system deeply before changing it, and proving each step against the behaviour of the original.

Critical systems moved without disrupting the operations that depend on them.

In a melt shop, everything moves by ladle — vessels of molten steel routed between furnaces, treatment stations and casters. Knowing where every ladle is, what it's carrying and how long it's been out of service matters for scheduling, for quality and for safety.

We build ladle tracking systems: live position and status for the whole ladle fleet, integrated with the Level 2 systems that schedule and record each heat, and feeding utilisation and refractory-life metrics back to the people who manage the fleet.

Identification combines machine vision — cameras confirming ladle identity and position at key locations in real time — with RFID, so the tracking system doesn't depend on a single technology or on operators keying in what they see.

This work forms part of our scope in the Electric Arc Furnace transition at Port Talbot, where the ladle tracking and management systems are being rebuilt around the new plant layout.

Every ladle accounted for — position, status and history — feeding scheduling and plant reporting.

Between the control room and the boardroom sits the management information system: what was planned, what was actually made, heat-by-heat detail, KPIs, delay analysis and overall equipment effectiveness. When it works, it's the single place managers and production staff trust for what the plant did — and why.

We build and modernise Level 3 MIS platforms for steelmaking operations: production overview displays and Gantt views, trending and root-cause analysis, shift handover reporting, and the daily-management data that runs morning meetings. Where reporting has accumulated across ageing intranet pages, we consolidate it into one supportable platform.

Under the surface it's disciplined plumbing: Windows services consuming real-time data from Level 2 systems, SQL Server storage designed for years of production history, and web front ends fast enough that people actually use them.

One trusted picture of plant performance, from the shift log to the KPI review.

A modern plant runs on data flows: PLC and SCADA tags streaming into historians such as OSIsoft PI and IBA; message queues carrying production orders, results and events between systems; warehouses feeding reporting and analytics. When those flows are undocumented or fragile, every project on top of them inherits the risk.

We design, audit and migrate industrial data flows. That means tag audits and structured tag creation in historians; message-queue channel design — including IBM MQ — with modern JSON messaging where receiving systems prefer it; SQL Server extraction and transformation; and clean APIs where direct database access isn't appropriate.

Every flow that crosses the OT/IT boundary gets security treated as an engineering requirement: encryption, access control and audit trails, with testing against the live process before anything cuts over.

Data that arrives where it's needed — on time, once, and trusted.

More on our systems integration work