Mill Test Reports – How to Easily Process MTRs in 6 Steps

Automating mill test reporting is a daunting task because the reports contain a diverse set of a given raw material’s chemical and physical properties.

Material test report processing is performed by trained professionals and is a very time-consuming but necessary process. But luckily, there's a far better way that can provide significant cost and time savings for fabricators and material customers

Go to the 6 Steps of How to Automate MTR Processing

What is a Mill Test Report?

A Mill Test Report (MTR) is a quality assurance document that certifies exactly what a material's chemical and physical properties are. MTRs also certify that a metal product is in compliance with an international standards organization's specific standards.

MTRs can go by other names, such as:

• Certified Mill Test Report
• Mill Test Certification
• Mill Inspection Certificate
• Certified Material Test Report

Basically, MTRs show proof of a metal product's origins, traceability and provide certainty to the end user about the metal quality and processes involved to create it.

Mill Test Reports usually include information such as:

• The country that the product was melted and produced in
• Physical and chemical property specifications
• Exact size, diameter or shape dimensions
• Compliance with standards organizations like ANSI, ASME or ASTM

Why is it So Difficult to Automate the Processing of Mill Test Reports (MTRs)?

There are many reasons for this, including:

• The vast number of fields contained on the reports
• The fact that the layout of the fields is different for each manufacturers
• Poor image quality because they’ve been printed, hand-signed, and scanned
• They often contain multiple languages since international distribution of these commodities is so common

Here’s a sample MTR for a steel plate from the Paul Mueller Company, a stainless steel manufacturer:

As you can see, there are a lot of fields of data, like:

• Data and general product info
• Product description
• Remarks
• Physical properties
• Chemical analysis
• Mechanical properties

The crucial thing to note is that once a raw product is shipped to a manufacturer, it is then their responsibility to track and maintain an awareness of the information on the test report. For example, in the steel industry this is done through a heat code, or heat number stamped or written on the metal itself.

Material Test Reports Are Vital for Quality Assurance and Compliance

MTRs are so important that ASME certification requires they must be kept on file for up to three years after a product has been used to create something. It’s obvious that this critical data be kept in a database for tracking and reporting.

And this is where automating the ingestion of MTR data is a huge time-saver for companies who use and process a large number of raw products from many different vendors. To make the point about why automation has been so difficult, perform a Google search for mill test report examples and you’ll see that there’s no standardization for how the reports are structured.

Here's a great article on how to review an MTR.

How to Automate Automate Mill Test Report Processing in 6 Steps:

1. Digitization / image processing
2. Optical character recognition
3. Machine learning / training
4. Build data models
5. Human data review
6. Data integration

Some MTRs are emailed in PDF format as part of the shipment notification for ordered products. However, in many cases only physical copies are available, so they must obviously be scanned.

Step 1: Digitization / Image Processing

The first step is taking the digital copy of the test report and using image processing software to remove all non-text elements.

This means digitally removing all the lines and non-text objects. Humans need this kind of document structure to gain an understanding of the data, but for software to “read” the MTR, these lines and objects only get in the way. And if the MTR has been faxed and dragged around a dirty shop floor, and then scanned – it’s going to need some digital cleanup!

Step 2: Optical Character Recognition

Next, perform optical character recognition (OCR) on the material test report to recognize all languages and text characters on the page. Modern OCR tools are advanced enough to run multiple OCR “engines” on the document  until a desired level of accuracy is achieved. Even if 100% accuracy isn’t obtained, this will be corrected in later steps.

Step 3: Machine Learning / Training

The third step is to use a supervised machine learning algorithm to train software to recognize that a document is the mill test report. This is important in case additional documents are attached to the MTR. You may or may not want to collect this additional data.

This training may sound daunting, but it really isn’t. Training is as simple as putting a test batch of MTRs into the system and telling it which pages are the material test report. Training might require a dozen examples, but not hundreds or thousands. Once the system learns what an MTR is, you can test it on a much larger set of documents to verify it is correctly classifying the documents.

Step 4: Build Data Models

After training has been completed, the next step is to build data collection models. Building these models requires an expert who has a deep understanding of what data is on a mill test report, what data needs to be collected, and the different ways information is referenced. For example, Heat #, Heat No., and Heat Number all mean the same thing.

A data collection model must be built for every important piece of information you need to collect from the MTR. If you build all the models you think you need, and later discover that adding a new one would be useful, you can always build the model and re-process your MTRs to extract just that one new data element.

Step 5: Mill Test Report Human Data Review

This step is one of the most important: human data review and correction. Remember I mentioned earlier that there may be some characters not read with 100% accuracy by the OCR engines? Here’s where the system is programmed to flag any word or number it isn’t 100% sure about.

In a data review screen, the test report will be displayed in a visual format so that what the system “read” can be compared with the actual document.

A critical part of human review is to set up the system to automatically search through known information, like Purchase Order Number, Material Grade, and Order Requirements.

By “looking up” this information in your database and comparing it to what was found by the automated processing software, you add an additional layer of quality assurance. So, if your purchase order was for a particular material grade but the MTR lists something different, this will also be flagged for human review.

Step 6: Material Test Report Data Integration

The final step of the process is to integrate the material test report data and the digital copy of the document(s) with your existing quality software or reporting tool.

It's only made possible by a new intelligent document processing platform called Grooper.

Interested in learning how to automate review processes for mill test reports?

Contact us to learn about MTR processing with Grooper:

Or Download the Guide:
How to Automate Mill Test Report Processing in 6 Steps

Mill Test Report FAQs:

What is an MTR?

An MTR is another way to refer to a Mill Test Report. MTRs are certificates that verify that the chemical make up of raw materials such as steel and metal alloys were properly analyzed.

These reports are created by the raw material's manufacturer and MTRs follow the metal along the supply chain until it's final destination. MTRs help inform the end user that the metal can stand up to necessary requirements for every day use.