Breaking The Mold: Foundry Digital Transformation
It’s no secret that the global supply chain is continuing to experience significant hurdles. Given that 90% of consumer products and many industrial and government applications use cast parts, there is a huge opportunity for foundries to take advantage of automation technology. The recent White House Executive Order on America’s Supply Chains specifically called out the importance of the foundry (and forging) industries for the health of American manufacturing.
Corso Systems has worked with many foundries (and which work with a variety of materials ) over the years. We have identified a handful of opportunities to help foundries benefit from the digital manufacturing revolution. While the processes and products are different, digital transformation concepts also apply to forges, and heat treatment operations.
Environment and Safety
One of the most important considerations for any company is the overall health and safety of your employees. The different risk factors to account for and to mitigate will be different, depending on what metals you cast, the types of molds in use, and your overall process.
In industrial foundries, the high ambient temperatures and poor air quality (due to dust, particulates and other pollutants) can lead to a range of health issues, including respiratory problems, dehydration, and heat exhaustion. By monitoring these factors, workers can be alerted to potential dangers and take appropriate actions for their safety. Using sensors and instruments to monitor air quality and temperature can also help to identify areas to improve for a safer working environment. Corso Systems has experience in developing and implementing solutions for monitoring air quality and temperature in industrial settings, and can help ensure the safety of workers in an industrial foundry.
By leveraging modern technology like IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) devices, process control systems, and industrial integration platforms such as Ignition from Inductive Automation, it is easy to integrate sensors in the facility, and even on an operator’s person. These same technologies can also send out alerts to anyone who is at risk of a potentially negative outcome based on the environmental conditions.
Scheduling and Production Optimization
Beyond robotics, taking advantage of Production Scheduling tools as part of a Digital Transformation initiative can massively impact your plant’s productivity. Up front planning can help you reduce changeover time and costs immensely, especially if you make different parts using different molds—and/or with different alloys.
Planning ahead, along with an ERP integration and/or warehouse management system (WMS) will provide insight into when you need to order more raw materials, or ship things out of the warehouse to clear up space. It can even help you optimize orders across multiple weeks or months for high volume customers, which will free up time for making lower volume products in an optimal way.
Since Scheduling and Production Optimization can even be applied to fully manual processes, it is one of the easiest and most valuable parts of the Digital Transformation revolution to implement. The more you are able to take advantage of automation and integration, the bigger the reward.
Precision Temperature and Process Control
As with most industrial processes, it is vitally important to precisely control the operating conditions of your equipment and processes. For Foundries in particular, this applies to temperatures, pressures, humidity, and the overall makeup of your alloys and mold media.
Utilizing Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) integrated with process control equipment simplifies process monitoring and control. Your operators can then input the set points that the PLC uses to monitor and maintain process conditions over any length of time. If anything begins to move out of spec, you can quickly alert your staff with alarms so they can make adjustments before losing product or damaging equipment.
Corso Systems has implemented PLC control on foundry, forging, and heat treating equipment for many companies. This includes everything from basic furnace control all the way up to very complex electrolysis systems for manufacturing steel with a very low environmental impact.
Integrating process control along with technologies like robotics, recipe management, and production scheduling, can quickly improve your overall production capabilities without the extra expense of additional equipment or staff.
Quality Control Innovation
Another powerful way to take advantage of new technology is to integrate your quality control processes as part of a Digital Transformation Initiative.
Automatically generating tags and labels for production runs and parts that require inspection is a common integration that Corso Systems implements in the Foundry (and Heat Treat & Forging) industry. Building in this functionality alongside recipe management allows us to populate the tags and labels with any relevant information about the batch. We can pre-print quality control tags including barcodes or QR codes for easy scanning into the QA/QC system.
Once the parts enter into the QA/QC process, we can further leverage software tools like a Lab Information Management System (LIMS) to handle sample collection, test results, and reporting. A LIMS acts as a central repository for all of your quality data. Along with the rest of the technology available with Digital Transformation, it can easily integrate with all of your other systems. These samples can apply to finished products, alloys, and to your mold material so that you can maximize its lifespan.
Moving beyond LIMS, once all of your data is in a database it is easy to add a Track and Traceability system. We have helped many companies implement this for their processes. Basically, a Track and Trace system allows you to track which raw materials went into a part or process, what happened to them, what was manufactured, and where it went. Then, if you find an issue after a production run has shipped out, you can easily reference the Track and Trace system and alert affected users and customers before they encounter the issue.
Repeatability With Robotics
Getting molds and materials where they need to be on the plant floor is a common challenge for Foundries. Many companies are now taking advantage of robotics to move molds, materials, and parts throughout their facilities. Robotics can help in Foundries as well as warehouses. Molds with finished parts can be extremely heavy or awkward to lift, often requiring forklift operator to manage moving them around. Parts may also need to be rotated to remove flashing during finishing operations or for general inspection. Robots can easly manage these operations. With the advent of vision systems, scanning a facility using LiDAR technology, advanced Machine Learning, and AI algorithms, we can quickly implement robotics in any process for Robotic Palletizing and Stacking.
Robotics can free up valuable operator time and focus, reduce costs for forklift maintenance and training, and improve the overall flow of material through your process.
Wrapping Up
Digital Transformation isn’t reserved for the most modern manufacturing facilities. Even processes using tried and true technology with a lot of manual intervention can benefit from the integrations available with Digital Transformation.
You can even use these concepts to quickly implement a job tracking system to help your customer service team get a leg up on the competition.
Corso Systems has helped many Foundries by designing and implementing Digital Transformation initiatives. To find out how we can help you get amazing results from new technology please reach out today!
