Many customers will have a headache about the delivery time of the foundry, and many customers will even arrange for special personnel to be stationed in the foundry to watch their products produced one by one. Failure to meet the promised delivery date is not only a management problem of the foundry factory, but is also determined objectively by the process and nature of the business in this industry.
Delivery time is a pain point for foundries for the following main reasons:
1. The complexity of the casting process:
the casting process involves more than 20 processes, mainly including wax molds, tree formation, shell making, dewaxing, roasting, melting and pouring, shell shaking, sand cleaning, shot blasting, inspection, rework, heat treatment, Shaping and processing etc. Each step requires a certain amount of time and precise operation, and there may be many potential problems, such as iron beans, pits, air holes, sand holes and defects, etc., which may lead to recasting or rework. Therefore, the complexity of the casting process increases the uncertainty of the production cycle and affects the accuracy of the delivery time.
2. Business structure dominated by non-standard parts - different inspection standards:
most foundries do not have their own product series, and most of them customize non-standard parts for B-end customers in various industries. Non-standard castings are usually designed and manufactured according to the individual needs of customers. Each product is unique and requires special process design and process production according to customer requirements. Because the inspection standards and process flow of each product are different, this makes the delivery time complicated and difficult.
Non-standard products have different inspection standards
1) Some products are appearance parts, and customers pay attention to surface requirements;
2) Some products are assembled parts, and customers pay attention to matching assembly dimensions;
3) Some products are safety parts, and customers pay attention to heat treatment process and mechanical properties;
4) Some products focus on anti-rust ability, and customers pay attention to surface treatment and salt spray test requirements.
3. Non-standard business products - the characteristics of many types and small batches:
Many foundries, especially those with silica sol technology, basically export directly or indirectly. According to the delivery period of 60 days for a batch of orders and 30 days for sea transportation, it is equivalent to 3 months from placing an order to receiving it. Therefore, most products only have 2-4 batches of orders a year, and sometimes even 1 batch of orders for as long as 1-2 years.
Therefore, for the factory, there are not enough orders to verify the stable process, and it is easy to have a high scrap rate for a batch of orders. In order to meet the customer's order quantity, the factory has to make up the order again, which affects the delivery time. accuracy.
In addition, because non-standard products do not have a unified process like standard parts, and mass production, technicians and workers are very likely to forget the problems that occurred in the non-standard parts made a year ago, and it is easy to make the same mistake repeatedly. The product orders are scrapped in batches, and the supplementary orders are made again.
4. Order changes and priority adjustments:
In the foundry industry, customers often change orders, request urgent delivery or adjust priorities. These changes may disrupt the original production plan, leading to delays in delivery time.
5. Most of the foundry industry is heavy manual work, and it is difficult to recruit workers:
the requirements for operators are very high, but there are few skilled workers. Most young people are unwilling to engage in the foundry industry. It is difficult to recruit workers. Difficult processes will become production bottlenecks, affecting the delivery of most orders within the factory.
6. Capacity limitation of special equipment:
In a foundry, the reserve of the quantity of many special equipment is not much, because the vacancy rate is relatively high in a year, such as large wax injection machine, vibrating grinder and manual sandblasting machine. Therefore, once there are multiple orders that require special equipment at the same time, there will be a situation of waiting for production, which will also affect the delivery date to a certain extent.
The combined influence of these factors above makes delivery a pain point for foundries, which need to precisely manage various factors during the production process to ensure delivery time accuracy and customer satisfaction.
In order to improve the timely delivery rate, esser Casting has implemented customized ERP management for more than 4,000 non-standard products in the factory, and the process requirements and process requirements of each product have clear records.
At the same time, each non-standard product has its own "product diagnosis certificate", which includes all problems that have occurred during the development of molds, sample production, small batch production, and mass production, and Tried solutions, so as to avoid technical and production personnel forgetting about the product due to the long interval between orders, avoid repeating the same mistake, and avoid repeating invalid solutions.
In addition, in order to avoid the dependence on heavy physical labor and avoid the problem of difficult recruitment, Baisai Casting started from the following two points:
1. Investing in a full-automatic shell-making production line not only avoids the problem of difficult recruitment, but also avoids the instability of quality, prevents the occurrence of high scrap rate to a certain extent, and thus prevents the occurrence of replenishment orders.
2. Improve the working environment. As we all know, due to the particularity of the foundry industry, the working environment of the factory is relatively harsh. Every year, we continue to invest in improving the working environment of employees and attract more outstanding employees to join the BESSER team.
Conclusion
Precisely because timely delivery is a common problem in the foundry industry, delivery is the unremitting goal of our Baisai Foundry. Only by solving the problems that most people cannot do, can we provide customers with excellent services.