consumables which can also affect the properties listed above. An ERP system can effectively manage these material certifications, inventory levels, material consumption, and optimize your procurement processes, reducing waste and ensuring timely availability of the correct materials. Quality is paramount in investment casting, as defects can lead to costly reworks or rejections. An ERP system allows for comprehensive quality control measures, in addition to maintaining traceability of materials and components throughout the production cycle, the tracking of process parameters and recording of inspection data can also be provided. All of the above leads to a lot of documentation and maintaining it with paper is just not practical, specifically, using your ERP software as many ERP systems have this capability. As raw materials are ordered and
received, technical specifications and certification documents can be stored with the received batch of material. The critical incoming Lot Number and location data can also be stored. (See Figure 1.)
Storing these details electronically
will allow your engineering staff to have easy access to that data when they are matching raw materials to the recipe of materials needed for a specific alloy. Once the specific alloy recipe has
been decided upon, the specifications for the alloy’s performance can also be defined and stored in your ERP. (Material Recipe screenshot, and Chem Specs shown in Figure 2 and Figure 3) As materials are issued to the floor in the production process, the lot
®
traceability function can be used to track the materials throughout the production process. This would include serializing the individual parts and also associating specification and certification data to those individual parts as needed. Shown in screens (Figure 2 and Figure 3) that are used to track materials across the production environment. Once your products have made it through the production and inspection phases and are deemed ready for shipment, then the creation of the associated
documentation becomes
a simple onscreen click instead of a multi-hour or day long hunt for the various needed documents! An example of a certification document generated
from stored electronic data in your ERP system, instead of multiple paper sources or spreadsheet sources is shown below. You can easily see that maintaining
all the varied types of data manually can be a massive undertaking. This is why you should use your ERP system to store all of this required data. Weeks or years later, when your customer is tracking down an issue with a part in the field and they call asking for the documentation on a specific lot, you can rest easy because you have all the data at your fingertips to demonstrate you made the part with the correct process and the correct material and it met the print.
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