Nikopol, Ukraine · Industrial software
FerroOps turns furnace floor operations into structured data. We build the digital layer that heavy metallurgy still runs without — shift logs, furnace telemetry, maintenance and energy analytics in one workspace.
The challenge
Smelting shops in Ukraine and across the region still run on paper journals, isolated control cabinets and spreadsheets rebuilt by hand every shift.
Furnace loads, tap times, charge composition and incidents are written by hand. Nothing is searchable, comparable between shifts, or available to management before the next morning.
Electrode position, transformer power, temperature and gas readings live in separate controllers from different decades. There is no single history to analyse a bad heat afterwards.
Repairs start after a failure stops a furnace. Every unplanned stop in ferroalloy smelting costs hours of production and a significant amount of electricity.
Electricity is the largest cost item in ferroalloy production, yet consumption is rarely attributed to a specific furnace, alloy grade or crew.
Product
A modular platform. Each module works on its own, so a plant can start with one furnace and one crew instead of a multi-year integration project.
Collects readings from existing controllers and sensors into one time series history, so any heat can be replayed and compared minute by minute.
Pilot readyReplaces the paper journal with structured entries on a tablet: charge, tap, downtime reason, safety note. Handover between crews becomes a record, not a conversation.
Pilot readyFlags drifting equipment behaviour before it becomes an unplanned stop, and keeps a full repair history per unit instead of scattered notes.
In developmentAttributes electricity consumption to each furnace, alloy grade and shift, turning the biggest cost line in the plant into a metric crews can actually influence.
In developmentApproach
Heavy industry does not adopt software through presentations. Every module is validated on a real production line before it is offered to the next shop.
Digital shift log and furnace data collection on a single smelting unit, run together with the crew that works it every day.
All furnaces of one shop on a shared data model, with dashboards for shift supervisors and plant management.
A configurable platform other ferroalloy and metallurgical plants can deploy without a bespoke project each time.
About
Nikopol is one of the historic centres of ferroalloy production in Europe. FerroOps started from a simple observation: the metallurgy here is world class, while the software around it stopped somewhere in the 1990s.
We work directly with the people on the smelting floor — operators, shift supervisors, maintenance engineers — and build only what they will still use in the third month. The goal is not to digitise paperwork, but to make production decisions measurable.
The project is at an early stage and open to pilot partners, technical advisors and investors interested in industrial software for heavy metallurgy.