Compress your operation.

Hearing that several OEMs are skipping regularly scheduled shutdowns this month drove home again how casting demand has continued far beyond what most of us pictured a few years ago. Your ability to make the most of this "giving period" mirrors how fast you can move castings out your door and get on with the next P.O. There's real money to be made in doing so, which presents a very real opportunity that wasn't there six or seven years ago.

What I'm talking about is opening up new capacity in your plants to take advantage of still-hungry demand. No, not the kind of capacity that involves obtaining permits, knocking down walls, buying and starting up new molding lines or putting on another shift (where would you find the workers today, anyway?). The capacity I'm talking about, rather, can be realized through working smarter.

I've seen those "Purchasers' Report Cards" that appear from time to time, and castings always take their biggest punch when it comes to delivery. These perceived long leadtimes undoubtedly result in some end-users designing away from castings. Further, any job that takes you any longer to ship than absolutely necessary eats up valuable floor space, resources and machine time that could be used to fulfill that next order.

At last fall's Steel Founders' Society of America's T&O Conference, Iowa State's Frank Peters shared how the Industrial Technology Institute found from a study of 65 foundries that the median leadtime (time to produce a casting order from an existing pattern) was 21 days. "If the sum of all the processing times for a casting is two days, the casting spends 19 days waiting to be processed," Peters said. In addition to the high work in progress costs the foundry assumes, another problem is a quality concern. "The delay between molding and pre-inspection shipping could allow a problem to go undetected for 21 days," he said.

Much of the problem in foundries is due to the "pushing" of work to the next station, whether it's ready or not. The result includes excessive stockpiling of material (both consumables and castings) that must be moved again and again - at subsequent processing steps. Just count how many times a pallet of castings is maneuvered before castings are handled in a meaningful way in the cleaning room for the first time since shakeout.

One way of identifying ways to open up production capacity is through a process value analysis (PVA), a systematic analysis of everything involved in making a casting. Anything outside of the actual processing of the raw material or part doesn't add any value and, as such, aren't things customers are willing to pay for. "Extra" mold and coremaking, in addition to material handling, equipment maintenance, repair welds and even inspection are all things that your customer could successfully argue don't add value to its component.

So with our 21-day casting completion leadtime, perhaps that figure could be improved if you could find a way to reduce raw material and finished good storage times, eliminate move,and-wait material handling between stations, pay more attention to scheduling and so on. Even simple things like performing a preventive maintenance task during a machine cycle can be an avenue for locating more capacity.

A lot of inefficiency I've seen is in the stepsister area of cleaning and finishing, where, unlike in chess, foundries aren't making each of their "moves" count. Until the day comes when foundries outsource cleaning and finishing or the area receives more capital dollars, it may remain a major bottleneck to steer through. But whatever areas you uncover, strengthening the weakest link in your value chain will provide results.

When I've looked at magazine production in this manner, I've come away with a clearer picture of our process flow hurdles - things like the extent of time a file sits idle on someone's desk or the doubly time-consuming article redesigns and post-layout corrections. By working smarter with greater accountability and by following procedures, we can open more time to devote to the next issue and find the capacity to produce special projects like a 13th issue, which is one of several new things you'll see in '99.

While process engineering is always important, this PVA exercise is particularly enlightening in rush times like these. You may have more process obstacles in your operation than you ever thought you could.

Just think what your plant could be doing in these "high times" if only you could get the work (and invoices, of course) out the door and get on to the next job. Why not make as much hay as you can before the rain comes?