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was important,” said Terry Lenhart, vice president of operations. “But we were concerned about the potential for more expense in scrap castings.” After a brief uptick in scrap, it’s now below the target at less than 4%. “A lot of it is the data collection we’ve always done but have made more available and clear, now,” he said. “It can be tailored to the job.”


ISO 9002 Quality


Certification taught the management team a lot, in 1992, and today St Marys Foundry maintains com- pliance as well as its own rigorous quality and safety standards. Paul Bergstrom came on board as quality manager eight years ago, bringing more technology to that role and document- ing processes in a more clear and accessible way. Quality control begins with the quote and progresses through shipping. “With detailed process


do some predictive maintenance, where you try to have everything on hand that you’ll need,” she added. Having the weekends mostly free to perform maintenance has been a boon to opera- tions. “We’re not wearing the equipment out, so when something breaks, we can fix it properly,” she said. Te company’s computerized main- tenance management system generates work orders based on time and flow. A staff member who is responsible for sched- uling maintenance inter- faces with the program and manages it.


Free to Be Flexible and Innovative


Time is a precious


information from the elec- tronic system, we can track all castings by serial num- ber,” said Bergstrom. Sampling is done on each job to check for defects, which often don’t show up until they’re machined at the customer’s facility. “It’s just as important for us to know when we have good castings as a cast- ing with a defect,” he said. “Hydrotest- ing often is the last step, and custom- ers give us feedback on those results so we can track back to data about the individual castings.” Te company retains testing samples and records for customers, as well as housing patterns in two large facilities.


The facility pours gray, ductile and specialty iron castings ranging from 500 to 60,000 lbs.


“We have a tremendous amount


of data,” said Dine. “When our customers audit us, they are impressed by our traceability, the amount of data we have and the fact that the data is actually being used. We have daily meetings and a process for ideas or suggestions from employees, to make sure they’re dis- cussed and potentially implemented.” Another big push introduced in


Dine’s tenure was a move from the old firefighting maintenance mode to preventive maintenance. “We also


“You feel the pride here.


We’ve made this plant what it should be the hard way.”—Angela Dine


24 | MODERN CASTING September 2014


commodity in a demand- ing industry, and working smarter affords room to think up new and better practices. Working with customers at the engineer- ing level also binds them to the metalcasting operation.


“If we can work with our cus-


tomer, the process is much more satisfying and successful for both parties,” said Dine. “If we can’t solve their problem with current technol- ogy, then we’ll invent something.” For example, Jim Perts, vice president of technical services and metallurgy, has created custom specifications for metallurgical requirements, and Lenhart has invented ways to ensure quality, including a proprietary filter- ing system. “We’re a job shop, so we make a


lot of different parts and every week is essentially different,” said Dine. “But we’ve become specialists in pressure vessels that are tested with very stringent requirements. Te pieces have a lot of changes and set- ups to them, depending on whether they are off-the-shelf products or others that are custom, yet highly engineered.”


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