Aluminum Foundries: Thriving on Quality and Diversity.

This diversified casting producer confidently doubled its production in 8 years with the help of a self-developed process control software system.

In today's ever-changing manufacturing world, diversity in capabilities and consistency in quality play tremendous roles in satisfying the needs of customers, no matter the industry. For the jobbing foundry, production depends solely on what the customer needs at a certain time. For most foundries, these needs rarely are consistent with various markets' tendencies to experience their fair share of booms and lulls in productivity.

Rusty Symmes, president of Aluminum Foundries, Inc. (AFI), an aluminum caster in Winchester, Indiana, knows this factall too well. His foundry, which serves markets such as automotive, petroleum and electrical, has weathered the ups and downs of its customers, learning how to survive and prosper along the way. To aid the foundry s one-stop appeal and protect itself from possible market downfalls, Symmes has branched out AFI's capabilities to offer sand casting (jolt squeeze and automatic), permanent molding and diecasting while, at the same time, balanced the quality assurance complexities of the various processes with an in-house-developed process control software system.

This article details how AFI has been able to ensure its customers consistent quality components while overcoming other obstacles brought about by its diversification.

Roots of Diversity

Founded by Symmes' father, Russell, Sr., in 1945, AFI began as a green sand and diecasting foundry, serving several markets in the Indiana area. A philosophy initiated by his father and still maintained today is "to not get too married to one customer or to one casting category because of the ups and downs of the economy.

Over the years, AFI has ensured customer diversity by continually expanding its capabilities, eventually adding automatic green sand and permanent molding. Its flexibility in production [70% sand casting (75% automated), 20% permanent mold and 10% diecasting] and volume has boosted its current customer total to 140 and its part total to nearly 1000.

AFI operates four facilities, all adjoined to one another. The oldest facility houses its original cope and drag lines, which feature four jolt squeezers. Next to that is a facility housing its four diecasting machines with up to 600-ton capacities (30-100 cycles/hr/machine) and two tilt-pour permanent mold machines (6-20 cycles! hr/machine). The other two facilities house its automatic horizontal molding machines, which were installed in 1985 and 1997. After the second machine was added, production increased by 30% while utilizing the same amount of manpower. The machines produce 100 molds/hr on cored jobs and 130 molds/hr without cores.

Ensuring Quality

In 1992, Symmes realized that in gaining new jobs over the years, which continually added to the complexity of maintaining AFI's variety of processes, the foundry did not have an efficient way of managing the quality issues without process control sheets, which workers found burdensome to have all over the shop floor. The foundry needed a system that could avoid erroneous or old data and eliminate the "paperwork nightmare," while simplifying shop floor workers' processing responsibilities.

Symmes and Jon Claney, then an apsiring software writer in college, went to work on developing a quality system using digital compression to manage a big diversity of parts and different customers' criteria and be put into the hands of shop floor employees. "If you have one customer, it's pretty easy to understand the criteria of how to clean and process their parts, but if you're running with 120-150 customers and 1000 parts, you have a large database that you need to maintain," said Symmes. "We needed a system to be able to manage the growth from a small company to a medium-size foundry."

Prior to development, Symmes' biggest paranoia was that if the foundry didn't run a part for 2 years, would anyone ever find a process sheet? "With a software program, even if you haven't run a job for 5 years, all the process requirements will be there," he said.

With AFI as the test site, the initial system simply captured Super VHS camera images that were stored on a central hard drive with the then-new compression technology. The ability to store the captures as an analog signal on a camera and then digitize them onto a hard drive was what started their thought process and gave them confidence that the system would work. The system could use motion video, but Symmes opted for frame storybook pictures of how the parts should be processed. "We knew that CDs were the only way anybody viewed instructional videos at that time," said Symmes. "That was totally unreasonable for a foundry because you'd have to send somebody in to do it and it would be obsolete the next day. So this system had to be programmable in-house and usable by people with the skills that we have. Images had to be good enough on the screen so that a person on the shop floor could tell what it was."

Symmes wanted to use touch screens on the shop floor because of dirt problems and regarded keyboards as almost unacceptable on a shop floor.

What the system essentially does is allows shop floor workers to pull up digital images with casting parameters and text procedures on any of AFI's castings (by customer name or part number) to assist them in producing the part exactly as it was intended (Fig. 1). "At their fingertips, they can get any piece of information that it takes to do their job," said Symmes. "Grinding, core setups, pouring temperatures, molding machine setups and location of tooling. It's sufficiently fast and large enough to manage 5000-10,000 parts with all of the digital pictures you want with quality attributes."

Ten monitors are situated throughout the foundry--one each in the grinding area, final inspection (Fig. 2), core room, squeezer cell and newer automatic molding cell and two each in the laboratory and office. A swiveling monitor is used by both the diecasting and original automatic molding cells.

System Advantages

Being a jobbing shop, AFI makes a lot of changes to its jobs and parameters. Once an update or correction (which are tracked by date) is made in the office, the information is instantly networked to all monitors. Having the touch screens on the shop floor allows workers to retrieve data whenever they need it in order to work on their part. They also can print out information if they need to bring it to another cell or machine.

By putting that information in the hands of employees, the quality of AFI's parts begins and ends with them. "By giving them more and more information through an easy software system, they no longer have the ability to say 'I don't know how to do it'," said Symmes. "There are no excuses. If I take away their excuses, I've won half the battle."

Because the aspects of casting procedures that are difficult to put into words are clarified with images, shop floor employees are required to make judgment calls less often.

Another advantage is that shop floor employees enjoy working with computers, no matter the application. "If there's a screen down, they'll want it fixed because they like using it," said Symmes.

This ties in to the issues of employee satisfaction and involvement, added Symmes, in that the system not only brings employees further into the loop of quality assurance, but it gives them the understanding that the foundry must have good quality. The system acknowledges to employees that a parting line is important and that overgrinding is a problem, thus improving inspection of parts. "We wouldn't go through all the trouble to have all of this information out there if it wasn't important," he said. Training also has been made much easier with the software, which brings new employees up to speed on casting technology in a more visual, modem manner.

Growing up in the foundry industry and having spent time on the floor himself, Symmes remembers not knowing how to do something or not remembering how to do something. The system has provided him with a great deal of confidence in the quality of his workforce produces. "It gives me the ability to go home at night and know that the workers on a night shift are going to know exactly how to make a given part," he said.

Aside from advantages such as faster setup times (20% reduction), less scrap (35% reduction) and increased throughput, the system has provided AFI the ability to expand into other parts and know that it can instantly start putting the quality parameters in on the new part.

The most impressive advantage the foundry has benefited from since developing the system has been its effectiveness as a sales tool. The system has helped AFI increase its part total from 400 to nearly 1000, and gross sales have jumped 50% from 1992-99. Symmes expects sales to rise another 20% this year. "Prospective customers always ask me 'How are you going to make our casting so that I know it's going to be the same every time?"' he said. "I walk them through the foundry and say 'Here's how we make your part."'

The foundry can handle more parts because it understands the quality issues out on the shop floor instead of worrying about issues such as overgrinding. While one customer may want his parts ground a certain way, another may not want his parts ground at all. "If you start mixing that up, you've got everybody mad at you," said Symmes. "So this is a good way to help ensure that each customer has their specific needs met."

With customers wanting complex information on how the foundry guarantees their parts, AFI sends out a lot of the quality information.

Symmes and Claney were confident enough in their software development to launch a company in order to market it. Several foundries have followed AFI's lead and successfully installed the system.

Aluminum Foundries, Inc.

Year Founded: 1945.

Casting Data: Aluminum (A356, 355, 319, 380. 360 and Almag 35) castings from 1 oz-150 lb.

Mold Capabilities: Green sand (automatic horizontally parted and jolt squeeze), diecasting and permanent mold.

Core Capabilities: Shell, oil sand and coldbox.

Melting Capabilities: Gas reverberato!y and crucible.

Value-Added

Capabilities: Heat treating, polishing, secondary machining.

Facility Size: 100,000 sq ft.

Key Markets: Automotive, petroleum and electrical.

2000 Shipments: 4 million lb.

Employees: 120.

Corporate Officials: Russell Symmes, president; Steve Bailey, vice president/production manager; Bob Hardwick, quality manager.

AFI Keeps the Flew with Material Heading

With four facilities and a handful of simultaneous casting processes at work, maintaining an efficient and consistent workflow requires a lot of strategizing on AFI's part.

A unique strategy implemented by the foundry is isolating its sand systems to the different production units. "We employ a cellular concept in a sense that we have a squeezer foundry that has a separate sand system," said Symmes. "We also have separate sand systems for our automatic molding lines. We call them cells because they are self-sufficient. We don't have to worry about the sand from the squeezers not being right for the automatic lines and soon. It also means you're never down. If you have a breakdown on one of the automatic lines, the other one can pick up the slack by running two shifts." The core room also is considered a cell, but it feeds cores to all of the sand cells and permanent molding.

Though it requires more maintenance and adds more cost to the initial installations, the cellular concept has helped to maintain the foundry's daily production capabilities.

Melting also is spaced out among AFI's cells with a 3000-lb/hr gas reverberatory furnace in each automatic molding cell, six 1000-lb/hr gas-fired crucibles for its squeezers, five 600-lb/hr crucibles for diecasting and two 1000-lb/hr crucibles for permanent molding.

AFI has the fortune of two cleaning rooms, one that handles the jolt squeezers and older automatic line and the other in the new automatic cell. What has eased the flow of castings from all cells through cleaning has been efficient material handling, one of Symmes' biggest concerns in his foundry. "We don't like a casting to ever stop moving," he said. "Once it's produced, that flow is virtually constant throughout the plant until it comes off the line or goes through heat treating."

With the cleaning room as the foundry's most labor-intensive area, the attention paid to automating its material handling benefits both the personnel and the shop's production. "Your metal costs are the same for almost all foundries within a range and your overhead costs are somewhat the same," said Symmes, who looks to continue implementing more automation and robotics into the foundry's cleaning and finishing operations. "What varies is the labor utilization. What we try to do is reduce the amount of direct labor, which makes us better than the next shop."

From a philosophy standpoint, according to Symmes, if the foundry drives the amount of man-hours per ton down, it's going to be much more competitive than the foreign foundry. Automation is key, though. AFI uses an automatic pouring system with its newer automatic molding line and turntable. Also used to, reduce direct labor input in the new cell is a self-designed monorail system that carries each casting from shakeout through cooling to cleaning.

Conveyors also are a big part of the equation for labor reduction. "Conveyors tend to make all parts have closer to the same process time," said Symmes. "You may have 10 parts coming from one cell and 150 coming from another. Since they're coming down the same line, those 10 get processed the same as the 150 parts. If these Were in a separate box, workers would spend a lot of time looking for them, then spend a lot of time figuring out how to process them, which is not as fast, so direct labor costs on small-volume parts goes up if it's not automated."

AFI conducts a constant cost study on all its parts. For every batch run, the man-hours it took to produce that batch are analyzed.

Another direct labor-reducing feature in the new cell is a four-screen video monitor located at the automatic molding station. The machine operator is able to monitor the pouring of the molds, the shakeout area, metal return conveyors and the blast machine. Lastly, dual operation, in which one employee runs two machines, cuts direct labor costs in half.