Plant engineering re-engineering casting production systems

Peters F, Van Voorhis T

Modern casting, Volume 91, Pages 39-41, 2001

Abstract: Foundries must reduce their costs. One area of the foundry that often is neglected in pursuit of cost savings is the post-casting production area, from shakeout to shipping. For traditional job shops, this area requires the greatest amount of manual labor and as a result, the highest manhours/ton. A steel foundry study summarized and shows that over 50% of the foundries take greater than 15 days to move a casting from shakeout to shipping. A methodology is shown for attacking this problem through the use of a flowpath analysis. An excellent example is provided along with 6 recommendations of approaches to be used to improve efficiencies in this critical area of cost.

Keywords: Casting, Casting production systems, Cost, Foundries, Plant engineering, Re-engineering.