Simple Solutions That Work! Issue 18

W e live in the unique and dangerous foundry world and tend to be an openly cautious bunch on anything that disrupts the way we learned how to mold, pour, and finish castings. Change—therefore, is usually something we tread lightly into. But all of us need to evolve. The risks and instability that we see in the market place; from worker shortages, supply chain issues and higher prices seem to be coming at us at an alarming rate. Fortunately for all of us, the technologies that have been coming on stream, especially in the past ten years are really designed to help us through this—if we allow our minds to be open to changing how we do things on the foundry floor. Additive manufacturing, automation, robotic work cells, and smart technologies are just a few of the advantages we now have to make higher quality castings with fewer operators, at less cost. None of these matters of course, unless you have a mindset for change. Olson Aluminum was very good at manually making green sand castings. But, if we had stayed there over the past ten years (only producing green sand castings), I’m not sure we would be as relevant as we are today or what our future would look like. Foundries need to do more than mold and pour castings; they need to be really good at making them differently whether through digitization, new processes, additive manufacturing etc., in order to grow. READING & ACTING ON MARKET SIGNALS Several years ago, we expanded our foundry to include automated no-bake production. As a green sand operation, adding no-bake capacity required putting down a new line in a new addition. Along with the new equipment and processes that we needed to learn, we also needed to understand who needed these castings and how to promote our new capabilities. We were coming from an all-manual green sand shop, to a more automated no-bake foundry; hardly a little undertaking. Our reasons for adding a no-bake line first and foremost, came from RFQs, that we were unable to quote. For the past few years (before we built the new line), we had seen the need to be able to produce bigger work, with more complex shapes which naturally led us to no-bake. All of this made sense at least on paper. But at the time, we didn’t have any customers directly asking for no-bake and realized our hurdles ahead would come in both securing that type of work and producing it on a world-class scale. To come to the conclusion that this was the right direction for our foundry, our first step was to engage the entire organization. In any large undertaking, we always say: “Do the research, but take your brain with you.” Any research in this area would certainly point to no-bake as a growth area in metal casting. What that research lacks however, is—can our operation produce well enough and our sales team sell enough to make this a profitable venture. In other words, we didn’t know what we didn’t know. FOUNDRY SPOTLIGHT FOUNDRIES’ FUTURE DEPENDS ON THE ABILITY TO EMBRACE CHANGE. ARE YOU READY? 4 By Tad Olson President Olson Aluminum olsonalum.com