Executives examine innovations in capacity, customer relations.

Panels at this inaugural conference revealed foundries may need to break down operating paradigms of 'metalcasting as usual.'

Seeking others' experiences while running at full-tilt and planning for tomorrow, more than 100 executive level foundrymen gathered at AFS Headquarters on May 15 - 16, for the first-ever AFS Senior Foundry Executives Operating Conference.

With an all-panel format featuring 16 speakers, two panels of key interest were adding capacity, not through capital investment but through round the clock production, and casting buyer's perspective on the give-and-take of customer partnerships.

Other panels focused on environmental issues; employee compensation; and equipment start-ups. The program also featured five metal-by-metal roundtables.

Continuous Schedules

Richard LeVan, discussed how WesCast Industries' three-year-old foundry in Brantford, Ontario, operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 50 weeks per year. It features four 56-man production crews with six shift teams (maintenance, melt, mold, pour, core, and clean and ship). It also has a separate preventive maintenance crew of five, while support staff operates on a five day, on-call schedule.

Employees work 12 hour shifts and rotate every two to four weeks. Only 12 hours of downtime per week are allotted for maintenance, and outside contractors are employed to augment the foundry's regular maintenance and preventive maintenance crews. Production workers also assist in maintenance duties and work on furnace refractory repairs/relines, training, cleanup and housekeeping.

LeVan said advantages of the schedule include: 20% more capacity than on three shifts;, better capital and fixed cost utilization; energy costs/ton cut by 7%; fewer shift changes; emergence of a multi-skilled, multi-task work force; more sophisticated maintenance; better use of support staff; and less overtime premium.

He conceded the schedule does have its drawbacks. Besides workers preferring a five-day schedule, he said the foundry has less flexibility in production scheduling and has difficulty planning capital improvements.

"Flawless maintenance is required," LeVan said. "It's tough to do all repairs properly in 12 hours a week. Also, furnace repairs can conflict with production, and we must replace refractories or machine parts earlier due to the only window of opportunity."

He considers its e-mail system and improved training to be real successes of the schedule. "System weaknesses were exposed," LeVan said, "resulting in robust maintenance and equipment." Among his concerns, he admitted, are the extra load for support staff; lack of face-to-face communication and employee well-being. "Also, there's no way to catch up."

Providing a nonfoundry perspective was Rowland Blondin, who reviewed the one-year anniversary of continuous operation at Ashland Chemical Co.'s Mississauga, Ontario, plant. "We did it to decrease unit costs and run more hours with our equipment, while avoiding capital investment," he said. "We did it to remain competitive - we're talking about survival."

They focus on preventive maintenance, he said, so overhauls take place "when we want them." He also noted they carry as few spare parts as possible by having limited types of equipment.

Going from a traditional five-day schedule to seven-days with overtime raises salaries, energy, fixed and variable costs by 40%. A seven-day continuous schedule, Blondin said, holds these costs to only 26% above the traditional schedule.

A U.S. perspective was given by Jack Scott, who scrutinized running continuously to expand Eagle Foundry Co.'s customer base and increase production to satisfy customer demands. Motivated to buy the Oregon foundry through an ESOP, foundry officials recognized the strong sales potential of increased casting production, yet saw few alternatives outside of a continuous schedule.

They found they needed to increase production by 10% to remain at even profitability. "We didn't want to go to seven days, but what do we do?" Scott asked.

They examined hiring; increasing hours, shifts or overtime; enlisting Sunday volunteers to charge furnaces for the first shift; upgrade equipment; butterflying induction furnaces; direct pouring; and modifying patterns to increase yield.

Opening the conversation to a seven-day schedule raised a host of questions, ranging from how to handle shift rotations, vacations, National Guard duty, religious issues of working Sundays, cashing paychecks, as well as doubts about the firmness of the backlog. During employee brainstorming sessions, they realized opportunities in these areas:

* patterns - reduce gates and risers, get more castings/board; incorporate more direct pour.

* molding - have molds ready to pour when coming off the line; address cause/effects of poor workmanship that directly relate to rejects and thus affect yield per heat; stack molds.

* pouring - increase yield through exothermic feeding aids; better mold positioning; lower pouring temperatures; increase backup supplies (ladles, etc.).

* melting - reduce new lining sintering time and tear-down schedule; increase refractory life; decrease cooling time needed at prepatch; use ceramic blankets; increase speed on hydraulic pumps to decrease time needed to tip up induction furnace.

* riser removal - package gates and risers to enhance furnace loading; provide remelt back to furnace ASAP.

* maintenance - proactive rather than reactive furnace maintenance; better training; evaluating stock of replacement parts; upgrade cranes to reduce downtime; form partnerships with suppliers of parts/services.

"The bottleneck was getting the metal out of the furnaces fast enough, and the biggest culprit was the cranes," Scott said. "Creative ideas were incorporated, employees felt a part of the process, and a bonus program is directly related to profit. All employees affect profit every day, on every mold, every pound, every shipment."

Eagle Foundry remained on a six-day schedule, and reporting on the first four months of 1995, Scott showed the foundry is coming close to meeting its goal of pouring 10% more.

When asked what WesCast will do in an economic downturn, LeVan replied, "We'll reduce the number of lines per shift, but we'll continue with our schedule." Blondin added, once you go to 12 hours, you can never return to a normal schedule. "All the resistance you met getting there will be 10 times more going back."

Adding Value to Castings

Providing casting buyers' perspective on requirements from foundries was Roy Parrott, Simpson Industries, Plymouth, Michigan, and Bo Witt, Cummins Engine, Columbus, Indiana.

"Foundries focus on shipping tonnage, and 30-50% of the tonnage you ship me is a waste," said Parrott, whose machining firm bought $163 million of castings last year. "We're a master at debarking, but our customers don't receive value for the chips we generate."

As a result of this "wasteful practice," Simpson: spent $1 million handling, storing and transporting chips (fostering the growth of an industry of "parasitic" scrap dealers and processors); added 20% in volume for the tool supply industry; purchased 10-15% more equipment than necessary if it didn't generate 60 tons of chips; and put money in the freight companies' pockets (a $7 million annual bill) for the unnecessary hauling of tonnage to and from the plants.

"If our objective was to create more nonvalue-added," Parrott said, "then we exceeded it by our greatest expectations."

Noting his firm had developed an expertise in chasing price, moving patterns and parrying with foundries during the supply and demand game, he said it's time to bury the rule that "Foundries sell tons and Simpson buys price."

He said foundries should demonstrate an excellence in product design control, since design drives 85% of a product's cost. "CAD and mold solidification modeling help us and the customer by developing a robust casting design that optimizes low-cost manufacturing, insures high Cpk quality and reduces weight."

Parrott also stressed that the importance of innovations that reduce machining time throughput. "If you can take one second out of a 30-second machining cycle, that savings should be shared."

He suggested foundries search for opportunities to improve and eliminate waste, develop deeper linkages in the business process (including freight, packaging, pull systems, scrap metal and administration), bring foundry defects/scrap rates to [less than]100 ppm; provide innovative ideas, products, processes to improve cost, quality and speed; and support them in capacity crunches.

Noting Simpson wants only a few solid suppliers to share both burden and rewards, Parrott said, "There's plenty of room to improve value if we optimize our strengths. I fully support more value-added in qualifying machining, near-net designs, new materials and administrative and logistical collaboration."

Bo Witt from Cummins, which bought $235 million in castings directly from foundries last year, reaffirmed the importance of partnerships as OEMs demand single-source suppliers, increased Cpks and more value-added components. Partnership advantages, he said, "are you get to know your customer better, partnerships tend to be local, and you have the first crack at new and replacement business."

"Meanwhile," Witt said, "peer/supplier partnerships are the least-cost way to expand your capabilities, by teaming your operations with machine shops, pattern shops, transportation/logistics and training duties."

He described the FlexCell group in Columbus, Indiana, that offers OEMs a variety of products/services without losing their competitiveness through diversity. The group includes a pattern shop, machine shop, CAD design company, software company, marketing, and management consultants, and involves several foundries.

"You don't have to be everything to everybody," Witt said.