Simple Solutions That Work! Issue 16

FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING & ENGINEERING TRENDS Palmer Manufacturing Palmer Manufacturing & Supply, Inc. ARTICLE TAKEAWAYS: • Understanding the ROI for automatic grinding • Automating processes –trains better employees that will grow with you Evolving the Foundry Cleaning Room with Automatic Grinding A utomatic grinding meets the employment shortage head-on by decreasing labor requirements while increasing casting production and quality. Metal casting facilities across the globe are facing the daunting task of maintaining enough employees to meet their daily production demands, and the area of the operation that usually takes the brunt of this manpower shortage is the foundry cleaning room. As our industry continue to change, it becomes increasingly difficult to find new hires that want to work in the cleaning room. If you’re lucky enough to have the proper personnel available, there are everyday issues to battle which includes chronic absenteeism, failed drug screens, work-environment concerns, a high rate of injuries and workers compensation, etc. This on-going issue presents a huge problem for most foundry operations because very often the bottleneck is caused by castings that cannot ship or be invoiced until they are ground/finished. Since the grinding/finishing operation is such a hard, physical, and dirty job, the cleaning room is usually the most challenging area to staff. No matter if you have a high production or job shop foundry, automatic grinding technology can provide the answer and relieve the stress related to managing these issues while increasing your quality and profitability. As a result, in just a few short years the rationale for automating the foundry cleaning room has evolved from “replacing excessive personnel” to “repurposing productive employees”. For many years automatic grinding was considered a solution for just the high production shops where they work on the same size and type of castings day in and out. Fortunately, the technology has now advanced to allow job shops to take advantage of this equipment as well. Suppliers have listened to the needs and desires of the foundry industry and responded with upgraded equipment that is more user friendly, reliable, flexible, and versatile. Adaptions have been made in the equipment and technology over the years that allow for very quick changeovers, ease of operation, simplified programming, lower maintenance, and shorter cycle times. Even with all these advances in the technology, the big hurdle for most foundry operations remains the justification of the capital expense on the automatic grinding equipment, or the ROI analysis. The ROI (Return on Investment) quantifies the value of your investment and will turn the subjective into the objective, and organizational uncertainty into support for the investment. In layman terms, the ROI quantifies that the result of the investment will produce more product at a lower cost while providing a means to measure the particular investment versus other investment options. If you consider that Foundry A currently produces a casting for $200 in cost. One quarter of that cost is the material cost ($50), one quarter is the overhead burden ($50) and one half is the total labor cost ($100). It takes one hour to manually grind the casting at $50/hour labor cost, so the cleaning room time is half of that total labor cost ($50). If the foundry can bring in automatic grinding equipment and reduce the cycle time for grinding by a conservative 50% ($50/2=$25), the total casting cost is now Continued on next page 17