Keynote: John Dyck, CESMII CEO

Digital Transformation Forum for the Steel Industry
From Islands to Ecosystems: Interoperability as the Steel Industry’s Productivity Engine
As reshoring accelerates new mill investments and brownfield upgrades, the differentiator won’t be bigger furnaces or faster lines—it will be the ability of disparate systems to work as one. This keynote makes the case that interoperability and standardization are the fastest, lowest-risk levers to unlock step-change productivity in steel: higher yield and throughput, shorter changeovers, fewer quality escapes, tighter energy control, and real-time genealogy from heat to coil.

We’ll map a pragmatic path from today’s data silos to a vendor-neutral, plug-and-play architecture using common IDs, shared semantics, and open interfaces, showing how standardized information models collapse integration lead times, enable effective integration with suppliers, and make AI/analytics portable across operations and across mills—crucial when staffing is tight and capital is dear.

Interoperability creates the pipes and the data foundations that will enable AI at scale. We outline how a standards-first data layer turns isolated equipment and process data into production-ready features and decisions.

Interoperability turns every new dollar of reshoring CAPEX into a multiplier—converting isolated assets into a coordinated, learning production system where AI is a capability, not a one-off project.