The following steps can help improve your inventory balance:


• Allow your purchasing manager to schedule material inventory levels tied into firm orders on the books.


• Periodically walk out into your storage areas and visually see how much material inventory is on hand.


• Ensure that your scheduling system is closely associated with your material inventory system and that you have the ability to forecast demand through a purchase order planner.


• Establish recipes of what quantity of raw materials and purchased goods, such as filters, are consumed.


• Automatically relieve purchasing material and stock inven- tory when production is entered routing-step-by-routing- step into the computer.


• Monitor and secure your materials against loss through employee theft. Copper, as an example, is an expensive commodity and employees have been caught stealing containers during the day for sale to recyclers.


Q


Question #5. Within your process flow, how do constraints or bottle- necks affect your operations?


❑A. We’re not sure we have them or where they are.


❑B. They make effective scheduling virtually impossible.


❑C. They have been identified in some places, but others may exist.


❑E. They have been identified and scheduled around.


❑F. We have an ongoing process of isolating and correcting bottlenecks


so that we can accurately schedule.


By identifying and eliminating a constraint in the operation, an organization can achieve maximum profit. If a molding line is capable of producing 100 molds an hour, but the core department can only supply 25 cores per hour, then regardless of the molds per hour, the total speed of the production line, and every routing step beyond is only 25 units per hour. Instead of us- ing capital to increase the molds per hour, something must be done to increase the cores/blows per hour. It helps to create a graphic representation of where your bottlenecks are. In a good scheduling system, management will be


able analyze how increasing the number of shifts in the core room or adding core machines can affect down- stream processes. Recording throughput production rates allows you to determine how many days it takes a casting to go through a process, such as de-spruing or X-ray testing. In analyzing a schedule for a particular part that


has been back-scheduled from the customer de- livery date, it becomes readily apparent where the bottlenecks are. Confirm your findings by walk- ing through each process to visually determine the bottlenecks’ locations. These will be the places with the most castings in line. Idle castings generally represent wasted money.


What’s Your Grade? It’s final exam time. How much does it cost to schedule


your deliverables? Cost is a function of doing business, and profit is a direct result of how well costs are man- aged. Profit should be greater than your costs. A multitude of costs are associated with inefficiently scheduling the operations in your metalcasting facility. However, through the use of modern scheduling techniques, you can dra- matically improve customer on-time delivery performance, effectively manage labor and material costs, and increase your profits.


MC About the Author


Shane Allen is head of the Synchro32 North American Operations, Austin, Texas.


Additional Scheduling Resources


Magazine Articles “Plotting a Course for New ERP Software,” B. Har-


wood, MODERN CASTING, December 2009, p. 25-27. “Cores, Cores Everywhere,” S. Gibbs, MODERN CAST-


ING, February 2009, p. 42-46. Books


Industrial Engineering in the Foundry, 2nd American Foundry Society, 1994.


Edition, Websites


www.erpfans.com — Independent user group with enterprise resource planning (ERP) news, resources and forums.


www.brint.com — Covers a variety of business top- ics, including ERP and material requirements planning.


www.erpassist.com — Offers news, articles, discussion groups and other resources related to ERP.


MODERN CASTING / July 2010


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