Suraja Yekkar

With over three decades of experience Hot Strip Mills in Mega Integrated Steel plant, the journey has evolved from managing shifts to leading the hot strip rolling mills as Senior Vice President. The team at JSW Steel prides itself on combining technical innovation with industrial goals, achieving significant milestones in productivity and quality standards.

The management of critical projects like the 5MTPA HSM3 has reinforced the position as industry leaders, thanks to the collaborative spirit and operational expertise of the team Committed to continuous improvement, ensuring JSW Steel remains a steel industry vanguard, consistently advancing the capabilities in a competitive global market.

In this journey, I had closely worked with M/s DuPont for establishing safety organization and M/s JFE, M/s Posco, Mr. Blazevic, Mr. Malcom for process and quality improvement and stabilization, with M/s SMS, M/s Primetals, and M/s TMEiC & many other OEMS for revamping and new mill building projects

Benchmarking Production: HSM#2 achieved Mar-23 month production of 5,15,000 tons, one of the highest monthly figures globally. The department has made a quantum jump in production with average coils per day increasing from 565 coils to 600 coils. This is the first and only hot strip mill in the country and very few globally to achieve more than 5MTPA production and HSM#2 has been achieving the same on a consistent basis.

New Grade Development (Make in India ) : HSM#2 successfully hot rolled and stabilized grain oriented silicon steel. HSM#2 was able to process and stabilize many Import substitute and first time in India steel grades like 58CRV4, S355J2+N, S700MC, S550MC, S500MC, A 572 grade-65, SAE1536, 26MnB5, API, silicon grades up to 3.5% Si, C70, Low Cost API X70 Grade, joint development of low cost X-80 grade, 1180DUB, 30MnB5.

New technology : HSM#3 project has many facilities like Evaporative cooling system, WHRS, slab transport system with capability to directly hot charge upto 100% of slabs from steel melt shop. These facilities reduces the carbon footprint by approximately 11,000tCO2/year. Furthermore, HSM#3 has been designed keeping of future

Gender Diversity: Conceptualization and stabilization of India's only fully women run cut to length facility, CTL#8. This initiative was recognized by BW Business World Magazine.

Visit to customers to resolve quality issues and for their process improvement:

International : Hoa Phat - Vietnam, Welspun -Saudi Arabia, Loadstar - Sri Lanka, Al Ghurair -UAE, JSW USA Plate Mill - Houston, USA, ATI -Pittsburgh, USA

Auto makers : Hyundai, Maruti Suzuki, Kia, Toyota

Pipe makers : Jindal SAW, Maharashtra Seamless, Ratamani, etc.

Cold rollers :Pennar, API Apollo, Ruchi strips, etc.

• Association for Iron and Steel Technology (AIST)
• Indian Institute of Metals (IIM)