WITH HELP FROM SYNCHRO ERP– Modern Investment Casting Company
by Shane Allen, Synchro ERP North American Operations
Dateline: 2750 BC: “Alechemedes
Mesopotamia: –
that lost wax casting you made for me just broke! There must be something wrong with your process.
Before I have you
make any more sculptures for me, this needs to be corrected! Your scrap rate is too high; I will have to find another source of my sculptures.” Di- olothelian the Sculptor. Just as in 2750 BC, to-
day’s modern investment cast- ers have been confronted with the issue of scrap. Scrap is as old as the investment cast- ing process which dates back many millennia.
In a broad
definition, a scrap casting can be termed as a casting that does not meet accepted speci- fications.
The Problem with Scrap What is the problem with
FIGURE-1
scrap? It represents an eco- nomic loss. An economic loss
Explores Opportunity Costs of Scrap is directly related to and can be accurately calculated as the value of the investment cast- ing that has been scrapped, but also needs to include op- portunity costs. There is more to calculating
ample:
Opportunity cost ex- When an airplane
pulls away from the gate with empty
seats represent the value of
a scrapped casting than ac- counting for the time, labor (direct & indirect), materials, overhead, and SG&A. opportunity
The cost associated
with a casting must include the scarce economic resources that must be allocated to hav- ing to reinvest the casting to account for the scrapped cast- ing.
An investment casting
facility can make the best use of its resources by not having to reinvest castings.
When
reinvesting a casting to ac- count for scrap, the machines, manpower, and material are being utilized to produce the same casting again when they could have been producing new items.
seats, those empty opportunity
costs– non-revenue– and can never be recovered.
When
an investment caster invests another casting to account for scrap, the metalcaster has an opportunity cost of not being able to produce a new casting for sale.
Modern Investment Casting Company
A Synchro ERP invest-
ment casting customer since 2009 with seven concurrent user licenses, Modern In- vestment Casting Company, Ponca City OK, is embarking on an internal program to bet- ter understand the causes of scrap.
Most investment cast-
ers within the industry report scrap as to the process stage FI that the scrap was discovered
GURE-2
at. More and more invest- ment casters, such as Modern Investment Casting Company, are undertaking the next step in understanding what caused the scrap by embarking upon root cause analysis. According
to Dave
Cashon, who leads sales and engineering at Modern Invest- ment Casting Company, the investment caster is making use of the real-time Synchro ERP SFDC module (shop floor data collection) for scrap data collection and production reporting (see Figures 1-2). Cashon indicated
the
reason Modern Investment Casting is going this direc- tion is that they want to know the scrap history of a part be- fore it ships to the customer. The ability to determine who, what, when, where, and why a casting was scrapped, allows preventative steps to be taken to improve the financial bot- tom line (see Figure 3).
Figure 1 18
Figure 2 August 2012
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